How to manage 10s of CI variables on 100s of gitlab projects with scoped under 5 environments?

Hello all,

I am in need deal with huge number of CI variables, is there any way to bulk import or manage them from external sources.

So far I am thinking of saving them along side other application secrets/configs in vaults/secret manager and writing a adapter function to update them on gitlab CI/CD settings.

Is there a better way to manage such large number of variables, my projects could be growing in days to come, and managing them with hand one by one would not scale.

It would have been easier only ifI could define the environment scope on group/subgroup level

Sadly there is no option to environment scope of a variable