This is a requiem for the 2-4 hours spent tracing a “race condition” only to discover await being added to JSON.parse causes the opposite behavior.
Upon looking back at “what does Meteor do” I originally imagined await … 
… and I even pasted the code above 
Just wow. Oh well, much more acclimated 
Have unified configuration layer working which goes between all, using the same convention, and abstracting out Meteor.settings across the board, other than within Meteor itself.