It's easy to get a little laugh from this, but congrats to the guy for exploring. Now he knows first-hand the inordinate challenge and can describe it in detail, but more importantly avoid these hard-learned patterns later.
Depends, I’ve known people who have gone through similar experiences and still poo-poo all those “unnecessarily bloated” solutions like a proper database.
we ended up with a lot of shitty solutions to problems that were hard to maintain, hard to extend, and hard to use because the more "complex" solution was really just a fancy version of a folder and some text files.