Removing / adding Perk Exclusivity

Hello,

I’ve been delving in the perk files for the last few days but I am not able to get perk exclusivity to go away or work with custom exclusivities.

I tried removing all the lines from the perk2perk_exclusivity.xml and adding new ones yet nothing happens ingame.
The default exclusivity remains - which is weird considering I deleted the content of that file-.
Console does show mods are loaded & I can see they work, just not the perk exclusivity changes.

Has anyone been able to figure this out?
(Used to work perfectly fine 1-2 patches ago).