One widely used plugins, even in professional circles, is Advanced Custom Fields (ACF). While I understand the use of it, I don’t necessarily think it’s a good idea as a long term solution.
In most cases, if you’re storing extra data with a post, that data is directly used by a plugin or the theme. If a theme or plugin is written properly, it should have an interface to save that data. If there isn’t, to me, that’s a sign of a lazy developer.
Although ACF is highly configurable, it’s a lot of code & server-load for what can be simply replaced with a single function , get_post_meta(). Too much processing on a poorly hosted server will interrupt the loading of the website and show the server message 503 SERVICE UNAVAILABLE.
All I’m saying is, if you’re an experienced WordPress developer, you shouldn’t depend on a plugin like ACF.