Typical Drupal FUD.

"Configuration lives in configuration tables" : the OP's point exactly. Configuration should live in a VCS

Bear in mind also that "configuration" van be so complex with Drupal it's often more along the lines of being "an application". A non-trivial view is hugely complicated and yet all its settings and code live in the database entirely, with no way to either back it up in a VCS or deploy it from a development environment to a live environment without manually copying the settings from one to the other.