I'm pretty sure it was OS X Server (or might have been NeXT) that had a feature where you could save the state of the server config GUI to a text file that you could check into source control and/or back up. Then you could load that file to get the GUI back to its previous state after you screwed something up.

It’s a next/macOS idiom to save user settings in the program’s defaults domain, which is a key value store backed by plist.

There was a show hn startup within the last month that did this for web based saas applications with chrome. Don't remember the name, though.