Comment by CamouflagedKiwi

Easier for internal development. Non- or less technical team members can tweak values without having to rebuild these binary files. Possibly also easier for lightweight modding externally as well.

This isn't that uncommon - look at something like Diablo 2 which has a huge amount of game data defined from text files (I think these are encoded to binary when shipped but it was clearly useful to give the game a mode where it'd load them all from text on startup).