Being smart is not the end of the game, software is created by teams. You could ask them to make reverse code review so that they can enjoy each others smarteness.
Strangely, it resonates to me in the context of finding "The Best Note Taking App" buzz. Whoa, X has backlinks! Yay, but Y is open source!
At the end of the day we all open the default system notepad.
If you use JSON for configuration (as it should be), why not update the whole file and get change tracked in VCS? If you use it as a database, why not Mongo then?