There’s a lot of words in this thread - can you be more specific about which problem you’re facing?
The nature of the resource.json file is unlikely to change in 8.1, but is likely to change in 8.2.
If you’re adventurous, I reproduced the signature calculation in standalone code here, which you could use to generate valid signature calculations for filesystem modifications: What's your method for resolving resource.json git conflicts?
Or there’s an approach documented here about basically ignoring the resource.json files entirely.