I've been trying to figure out why my .ini edits for grass distance and full speedtree LOD weren't sticking. Everything looks fine but as soon as I open the pipboy I can see the grass and LOD bushes disappear and the game goes back to vanilla distances again...it doesn't change the actual .ini file but it kind of cancels out their effect and restores vanilla behaviour.

I'm not using many mods and I tried disabling all of them just to be sure but no luck, also made sure the default .ini file had the edits, it's pretty baffling