WTH managing configurations

I hope that a “big picture” issue is appropriate here … As an old software developer new to Home Assistant, I’ve found it unexpectedly hard to get up to steam & I’m probably missing some important concepts (in which case, this might be a documentation issue). But what I find most difficult is not being able to see all of the “code” (yaml?) for one “aspect” of the system in one place - and to manage it with git - things seem to be spread over multiple configuration files, some manually edited, and some accessed by different parts of the GUI. For example, if I’m working on some new project - such as a bathroom heater, I’d like to be able to collect all of the configuration related to that in one place, and and store it in a separate git branch where I could easily enable/disable it and try out multiple versions. I can see that there is a conflict between the GUI and the manually edited files - but perhaps we could have something which exported/imported all of the configuration referring to things with a particular label? Or maybe we could have git integration for the configuration directly in HA? I hope this makes sense and is useful …

As I keep whatever possible in HA in yaml I’m also struggling backing up HA Core configuration to git. This all started when integration setup shifted away from yaml to config flow.
On the top of that some files in .storage contain both configuration and runtime data (last modified, values changing) instead of the two things being separated.

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