Access custom vertex layers through Attribute node in shaders

As far as I can tell, there is currently no clean way to access custom (float) vertex layers in a shader node.

It is easy to create new layers of vertex attributes in python. I use bmesh to create a float layer and then assign a float value per vertex.

However, accessing these values in a shader seems to be unecessarily complex, by either re-using UV coordinates or vertex colors: Here's a good breakdown of the problem (and the suggestion to use UV layers): blender.stackexchange.com/questions/161664/using-float-property-layers-value-in-node-editor-similar-to-vertex-color

Context: I want to use this in procedural generation of meshes, where I assign vertecies values during generation of the mesh which will later be used as inputs in the Material/Shader nodes.

I could work with vertex colors as a proxy, but I find that quite ugly.