The bridge's properties should be validated in a central manner, ideally very early in application startup. This will improve the error messages users receive on misconfiguration as they will see all mistakes at once and not only the first ones that fail, followed by new failures after fixing the first ones.

Hint
We could do this centrally in the BridgeProperties class or in the single property classes, using the instructions from here: https://reflectoring.io/validate-spring-boot-configuration-parameters-at-startup/
However, when doing this in the nested property classes, implementing the Validator interface will not trigger those classes to be validated somehow (only worked in the BridgeProperties class for me on first try, probably because only this class is annotated with @ConfigurationProperties)