Yes, the sqlite defaults are quite terrible out of the box. I'm not sure why they never changed them, it will start choking at 5k inserts where other dbs can do 100x that (and so will sqlite in wal and a few other settings). Getting it to perform well in high traffic scenarios would be a lot of effort. I struggle to get it to be vaguely performant in embedded use cases and often roll my own poor man's version unless I really care about data integrity (which is rare).