Honestly, I quite strongly believe it is a "best practice" to use static data in code (or a file packaged along with the code and read in at startup or package

Honestly, I quite strongly believe it is a "best practice" to use static data in code (or a file packaged along with the code and read in at startup or package compilation time) up until the moment it no longer works. It doesn't seem to be a widely agreed upon one in my experience though, which is a shame.