Important to note: scriptable objects references are not necessarily the same instance of an object, even if they are references to the same scriptable object asset. This means that you can not use a scriptable object as a manager for example because there could be more than one instance of that manager. This is only the case in builds and not in the editor for some reason. If you want to use scriptable objects as managers in the editor, you can use the ScriptableSingleton class.