Discovered why our issue is happening. It’s because we call register_field_group() on the backend but not the frontend so the acf-field cpt entry is not detected.
in /api/api-field.php in the _acf_get_field_by_key() method it users a get_posts query that looks for the custom field, but it’s not added in.
So get_rows for repeater fields depends on the custom fields being in the db, where as get_field() does not.
