As a note to time travellers: the information in this thread is obsolete I think.
ATM (jan 2021) the anvil.yaml file does contain data table information that is being used. In fact if you use git to sync a DEV app to a PROD app references to the PROD data tables will be overwritten by references to the DEV data tables, thereby losing all production data. Unless you find the table references in a backup and manually restore them.
Look at the discussion here for a workaround of sorts: Handling anvil.yaml in a git workflow
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