Backdrop really ought to have, or be able to have, placeholders for admin form inputs. More and more designers hide form labels and rely on placeholders to provide information in a clean manner.
Perhaps the easiest place to visual this working is on the User registration/login and password forms. Here's an example:
Whilst it's feasible to add placeholders per input field and form through your theme template.php file, surely we should be taking full advantage of HTML5's features and have this in core for all admin forms?

Recent comments
The simple way is - View source code - Copy and paste what you need - Bold can be easily added with <b> or <strong> tags
Use text editors in Summary Field
I have had a read of what Lando provides, and it's an excellent development tool, and it would solve the problem. But, I would prefer to find out why the problem is there in the first...
How often is the settings.php loaded.
Thanks for the info. I will give it a try...
How often is the settings.php loaded.