Sorry, I missed that. I was assuming you meant something different.
In almost all cases where image field, repeaters, or anything in ACF that does not store a “text” value are not returning what they are supposed to it is due to some filter, usually a pre_get_posts filter, that is interfering.
There could be some other filters doing this, but like I said, 99% of the time images returning IDs instead of images or repeaters returning numbers instead of rows, it has been a pre_get_posts filter.
Probably not much help since anything that filters WP_Query can cause this.
