An Unreal project’s settings are not a file. They are a stack of ini layers the engine applies in a fixed order, and the value you get is whatever the last layer to mention a key said. Over a couple of years a DefaultEngine.ini collects lines that lost that race: an override a platform file already overrides again, a value restated identically in two places, a setting added during a bug hunt and never removed. None of them do anything, and all of them look load bearing, which is why nobody deletes them.
Config Warden reads the layers in the engine’s own order, reports which line won for every key, marks the ones that can never win, and removes them.
The part that matters is what happens after it writes. It reads every layer from disk again, resolves the whole hierarchy again, and compares that against the resolve it took before the edit. If a single value moved, it restores the files exactly as they were.
It is one Editor module that walks Unreal’s own public GConfigLayers table, so it runs headless and gives the same answer in CI as on your machine. Commandlet only, no editor panel. Built and run against Unreal Engine 5.8, and the uplugin declares 5.8.0, which the engine enforces.
The plugin and its documentation are AI authored. That is disclosed on the listing.