Hey - there's some dependencies here on your version. Older versions of Kibana will put you entirely in angular, and newer versions will wrap you in react, and newer yet will be angular wrapped in react wrapped in a new platform api :).
A good starting point for current versions of Kibana is How to update the state/props of a custom visualisation component after the initial render?.
On the other hand, if you just need to hack together something that works window.refresh() should do. If you want to avoid the whole page refresh, parsing + updating the rison in windows.hash should work too. It's not recommended, but if you need a quick fix.
Restarting the Kibana server and/or dynamically updating kibana.yml isn't something we're doing currently for security reasons. Possibly some settings in the future with protections in place, but nothing ATM.