How can I mod text? Also, help on making a workshop mod (HD edition)?

I have the HD edition and I've been having some fun modding the numbers of the game in Genie Editor, but when I try to change the names of things in Genie Editor, that program crashes.

I found some reddit posts from a couple years ago where Cysion says you can just directly alter the text file with notepad (found in steamapps\common\Age2HD\resources\en\strings\key-value) but if I alter the ''key-value-strings-utf8'' file the game crashes on startup.

Is the solution something to do with the ''key-value-modded-strings-utf8'' file? I tried to make a workshop mod, following a guide, but it didn't do anything even though I seemed to have everything in place. I can play my modded game version when I replace the original data file with mine directly, can't seem to get it to work as a 'mod' though.