Does this answer my question?

Naturally I'm not talking about the "if nothing goes wrong case", but the power failure case, and thus obviously you shouldn't omit the fsyncs.

> fsync can silently fail

I don't think that's what the article says, nor do the linked references such as the LWN article about postgresql's "fsyncgate", where the problem is about re-opening files, and not re-doing writes when fsync returns failures.

In what I am talking about, and what "Bornholt et al., ASPLOS’16" are talking about, you do `fd = open(); write(fd); fsync(fd), close(fd)`, and I have not found any report of that silencing errors or not working as expected, except the linked HN comment by "tfha".