A staging environment often has different context than a production environment, particularly when it comes to handling environment variables. This can lead to burdensome and error-prone manual checks for differences in context. However, with build plugins, developers can access and modify environment variables on the fly without having to repetitively account for differences in context. By using deploy contexts to identify specific environments, build plugins can dynamically swap out process.env variables, saving developers from pesky conditionals. Additionally, there are pre-built plugins available that provide this functionality, such as netlify-plugin-contextual-env, which can be easily added to a Netlify configuration file.