To add onto mholt's reply, we avoid implicitly enabled functionality where possible (the only feature that's implicitly enabled generally is Automatic HTTPS, off the top of my head). By default, Caddy's HTTP handlers do nothing which is good because it gives you a clean slate to build on top of. If you had to turn off features to reset back to zero, that's cruft. For example, think of CSS resets, which are needed to turn off styles added by browsers by default; that's annoying and a complication that all websites need to deal with to get consistent behaviour.