Page ordering by title in WP Admin is not working - php

Question

I want to generate a list of checkboxes in a custom meta field for a custom post type in the Wordpress admin. I am using ACF to create the fields. I can query all pages, but the orderby parameter is not respected. It just outputs them by date_created.
Here is my query:
$pageArgs = array(
'post_type' => 'page',
'posts_per_page' => -1,
'nopaging' => true,
'orderby' => 'title',
'order' => 'ASC'
);
$pageArray = array();
$pageQuery = new WP_Query($pageArgs);
if($pageQuery->have_posts()) {
while($pageQuery->have_posts()) {
$pageQuery->the_post();
$pageArray[get_the_permalink()] = get_the_title();
}
}
You can see I create an empty array and enter the values from the query into the array during the loop. If I dump the array after the loop, the orderby parameter is not reflected. Moreover, if I dump the query object, it shows the SQL query and it is ordering by menu_order still.
$pageQuery dump:
...
public 'request' => string 'SELECT SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS wp_8_posts.ID
FROM wp_8_posts
WHERE 1=1 AND wp_8_posts.post_type = 'page' AND ((wp_8_posts.post_status = 'publish'))
ORDER BY wp_8_posts.menu_order, wp_8_posts.post_date DESC LIMIT 0, 10'
...
Is this because the query is made in admin? I can certainly sort the array, once the loop is complete, but in an effort to understand WP a little better, Id like to know why this is happening.
Also, I can query this and it lists the pages properly....
$args = array(
'authors' => '',
'child_of' => 0,
'date_format' => get_option('date_format'),
'depth' => 0,
'echo' => 1,
'exclude' => '',
'include' => '',
'link_after' => '',
'link_before' => '',
'post_type' => 'page',
'post_status' => 'publish',
'show_date' => '',
'sort_column' => 'post_title',
'title_li' => __('Pages'),
'walker' => ''
);
var_dump(wp_list_pages( $args ));
which dumps the page names in alpha order.

Answer 1

This is a mixture of two mistakes.
My query was very wrong, as well as the ACF documentation. It should be
'post_type' => 'page',
'posts_per_page' => -1,
'orderby' => 'meta_value',
'meta_key' => 'title',
'order' => 'ASC'
ACF docs say it should be 'meta_key_num', but that did not work for me. I could order by the custom ACF field using 'meta_value'.