We should have a helper function for devFlags, to be used everywhere we're checking a bool env var flag

[jiridanek]

          We should have a helper function for this, to be used everywhere we're checking a bool env var flag. I'll open a ticket from this comment to remember.

One possibility would be to use https://pkg.go.dev/strconv#ParseBool there; and another possibility would be to accept "true" as true and any other string as "false"; not sure if we should have defaults for when env variable is not present (current code takes that as false, if I am looking correctly).

Originally posted by @jiridanek in #434 (comment)