I think you’re overvaluing how difficult it is to change integer values through an API.
Personally, I was doing this two decades ago when developing a tournament grade TRIBES server modification, and I wanted to test out new values.
So I’d edit the serverconfig.ini, and run exec(serverconfig.ini).
Which is what lead me to suggest directly to Jeff Kaplan that they should put hotfix balance patching into the game 3 years ago.
And yeah, I missed the client-side aspect of that, but it’s not really that much more of an issue.