DB configuration for primary and read-replica instance in adapters

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We have a MongoDB / AWS DocumentDB cluster that we want to configure on Payload.
The read preference we want is secondaryPreference but we also want to enable autoCreate & autoIndex options.

Due to Mongoose's restriction on having both the above in a single connection call, more details here, it is difficult to achieve this in payload since we only have a single adapter instance to provide.

I believe they want us to configure two connections in the application, one for primary with the autoCreate & autoIndex set and another (secondary / read-replica) for all reads.

I am not sure how to achieve this in Payload.
Since Mongoose schema is also something that is abstracted within Payload, don't think I should be taking out the core logic and triggering the connection manually.

I have considered initializing payload twice (sequentially) with different DB configurations i.e. primary first to auto index & create and then secondary.
Or create a separate script that runs outside the starting payload server which would make a connection to the primary and sync schema and die, letting the required application server start later.

Wanted to understand if there is a better way to achieve this.