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?
If these other people have similar systems you could even authomate it via shared API so that they are just doing ping-pong of howareyou-imfine. Win-win!
Interesting, is there a website which offers a set of real dev problems to solve? Like, here is the IP of a prod environment, we are getting 500 with some combination of POST request parameters to this endpoint, the logs say there is something wrong with deserialization, integration tests are green, customers are screaming. This kind of things, not "find a sum of polynomials"?
Some people can be aware of what you think their emitions are driven by and use it for manipulative reasons when you react accordingly. Probably it is a good idea to treat people as grown adults who can be responsible for their reactions whatever reasons are behind them.