@lucidlips I might be confused, but I think this question is about filtering the ACF relationship field UI to exclude draft posts (admin), not how to not show draft posts on the front-end.
Your solution it explains how to exclude posts of a certain status from a loop, which I’m sure is helpful to many. But, it hasn’t nothing to do with ACF, but rather post loops.
BTW. post_status is a column in the wp_posts table and is returned with the WP_Post object, so you could also use this condition:
<?php
if ( 'publish' === $post->post_status ){
// loop code
}
?>
ref: https://codex.wordpress.org/The_Loop
ref: https://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Post
