You can disable the fsync calls in sqlite if you wanted to do a little better with this benchmark. You're also explicitly choosing the WAL in your go-sqlite3 configuration which is not at all replicated by your filesystem test. I think, honestly, that you're just going to mislead and confuse people who don't know any better with this writeup. I can write faster to /dev/null, too, but that isn't a very interesting comparison.

There's some 10-year old webpage that used to be popular on HN that goes into data integrity issues and fsync and filesystem databases that someone should dig up so you can read.

I am not aware of implicit fsyncs. Can you please link to what you are referring to?