You yourself said that you are attempting to get a field value before init, this in my opinion is the reason for the error/warning you are seeing.
I don’t think I said that anywhere in this thread. I said the init is always performed and as you mentioned the documentation states you do not have to wrap the get_value in an init hook. Please open up the acf_maybe_get_field function you will see the init call.
The notice is just suppressed when you wrap all code in acf/init hook but the return value is still incorrect, it’s different when using the key to get the value. It would return 1 instead of true in my case and this might cause unexpected side effects. This is a bug in my opinion. And if it works with a key without wrapping with an init hook it should also work with a name in my opinion, which technically is a simple fix and as a side effect improves performance for some users. Not sure why you would not want that.
