If you find yourself adding a database because thats less painful than regular deployments from your version control, something is hair on fire levels of wrong with your CICD setup.

I think this misunderstands the need for iteration! Maybe I could have written it more clearly :).

The reality is that you don't want to re-deploy for every prompt change, especially early on. You want to get a really tight feedback loop. If prompt change requires a re-deploy, that is usually too slow. You don't have to use a database to solve this, but it's pretty common to see in my experience.