Each citation is added to a formatted JSON file when it is first seen. After this it stays the same. This means you can fix the citation data by hand by just editing the JSON file. You should include the JSON file in your version control. An example is here [1]

Of course this might not be as comfortable as a GUI editor like Zotero, but I think I still prefer doing some small tweaks to a JSON file vs. the problems I've had in the past with Zotero exporting. The auto-export didn't always work consistently, and Zotero has many features that I don't need at all that make the whole thing more complex and fragile. Even collections are somewhat confusing to work with - I've often added citations to the wrong collection because it always adds to the currently open one, and then had to spend time to find it again. You also can't know which references are actually used and which aren't.

And I pretty much always gave up as soon as someone else needs to work on the same paper, which then leads to managing the .bib file by hand anyways.

[1]: https://github.com/phiresky/pandoc-url2cite/blob/master/exam...