I’d argue that talking about Markdown editors being mainstream, and that losing data in one Markdown file is less bad than losing it in a database, is kind of turning the bug into a feature.
As we know, Markdown is just plain text with conveniently light formatting and without an exact definition, which is why there are so many slightly incompatible flavors – and no one cares too much, because it’s still just plain text. It’s all for convenience. If it gets "corrupted’, what does that even mean, given that (again) there’s no exact definition? As long as it’s human-legible many wouldn’t even notice until the data loss is catastrophic.
Now, the moment you try to use such an ill-defined format as a database… how could that ever work, without tightening its definition and adding resiliency features that break its lightness and convenience? Suddenly you can no longer edit it manually, and 99% of mainstream editors don’t understand it or break it when editing. It’s the worst of both worlds: inconvenient pseudo-Markdown with bad structure for DB usage.
And I’d argue that that is the scenario we are in right now: why can’t Logseq files be simply used with e.g. Obsidian without breaking features? Why the Sync problems? Why even local data loss problems?? So I guess the devs realized that this route was going nowhere and decided to make the jump.
In a bad case scenario where the user has Logseq running on 2 machines and writes in one and then right through the other, with multiple files the worst case scenario is data loss for that one file that was edited.
With Sqlite however, the database is a single file, so the data loss is way more dangerous, since it could involve corruption too (and as such, complete data loss).
I know little about DBs, and still can see that there’s a lot of assumptions in that paragraph that make 0 sense to me.
DBs have been dealing with storage problems for half a century. Markdown is a toy text format that was originally published just as a blog post. The idea of a Markdown-based DB-like thing is… just asking for silly trouble.