It's unfortunate that many of the modern components frequently seen in Linux environments do not appreciate/respect/promote the use of plain-text files and scripts. Thinking of systemd and its many utilities, Docker, etc.
Isn't systemd's configuration entirely plain text?
I think what bothers me about both is that the presence of text files in a predefined location is not enough to make things happen on its own. Instead of the simplest possible everything-is-a-file and interacting with the filesystem is the interface, you have an additional requirement of calling binaries and their subcommands.
It reloads its configuration on SIGHUP (same as daemon-reload).