The article makes sense in this context, and after a reread, the hint is identification of background in the first sentence. I misunderstood due to the title of "Everything that uses configuration files should report where they're located",and lines "if a program uses a configuration file (or several), it should have an obvious command line way to find out where it expects to find that configuration file.", and use of "program" in general.

Specifically, "program" in this case refers to "CLI program that runs on Linux, used by the IT field".