Almost every program that we run has access to the environment, so nothing stops them from curling our credentials to some nefarious server.
Why don't we put credentials in files and then pass them to the programs that need them? Maybe coupled with some mechanism that prevents executables from reading any random file except those approved.
I'd be very thankful for an example of your setup. I'm using Bitwardern for browser-related password management, but for convenience scripts I load the credentials as env vars at login through .bash_profile 😅