Basically, my team is curious if there's a smaller, lighter, local-alternative to Airtable, which we can collaborate on with Git. It's a big ask and maybe not on your roadmap, but something that is on our minds.
I do that. Many, maybe linked, CSVs. Load all into SQLIte, query, filter, sort, etc.
In the repos to process we have only scripts to load and filter. The SQLite things are short lived.
Also, memory only SQLite FTW!
Really nice.
Airtable has a great UI but the data becomes isolated from our ETL script and it means we have to re-download and export to CSV to use in other contexts.
It'd be great if we could load a CSV into a desktop editor, and then have it store certain views/linked records to other CSV files in a local "db.json" file.
As for versioning sqlite data, just don't ever update or delete any rows but instead only ever insert the updates as a new row. Potentially you could add a 'deleted' boolean and 'inserted' date columns to the tables you want to version. That way you can use '... and deleted = false' to filter out old data and you also know when updates occurred.
The closest to a best of both worlds is to use something like JSON to store the data in git and then a tool like Datasette to build an SQLite-powered view on top of that repo.