I am trying to understand a bit more about configuring the yaml. I notice that the select (where you specify tables) and metadata are in the environment specific area? Is there a way to not have to repeat this for each environment? I have looked at the inheritance and shadowing but not getting that to work since that seems to be in the plug-ins section and not the environment config. Still learning every hour

You can define your plugins globally at a top-level

plugins

key in your meltano.yml and then environments can be set to override specific configurations. I do think our docs could do a better job of explaining this though