Handling PHP Generated Configs instead of dynamic

Myself and another developer have been bashing our heads against this code for the past day, and its due to how ACF under the hood handles post meta when the options are exported as PHP instead of being driven by the database and you are reading it in.

We work on a team of several devs and having to pass around configurations is incredibly frustration and also means we can't deal with things like programmatic updates for releasing via deployment tools.

The crux of it comes down to the following. When you generate the PHP options and load them via functions.php and ACF reads them in, ACF no longer creates posts in the wp_posts table, and exclusively creates them as post meta because it knows the mapping. Leveraging this configuration would be a huge performance boost for corcel as well as make for a far more ideal scenario for multi-developer projects.

Any ideas on how that could be accomplished?