It also happens to be a SQLlite3 database. And the same is true for a slew of other applications that (quite rightly) use SQLite databases as their file format.
You might be thinking of things like financial transactions, or medical records, but that's not the only kind of important data there is.
The amount of hell that would be unleashed if the financial systems layers upon layers of database transactions got broken is impossible to comprehend.
So if you mean “important” as “necessary for society to function”, then no, your browser bookmark files, contact list, or the other two dozen things your laptop and phone use SQLite for are not important.
Better to compare to the prospect of all smartphones being irreversibly corrupted at once.
You can not restore a data center from a pile of phones.
It's all semantics, and also irrelevant to the original article anyway, since nowhere does it argue that SQLite holds the most data (important or otherwise).
For what it’s worth, I have used any number of databases over the years and SQLite is very good for a number of things.
None of those things are the core infrastructure that stores your emails, money, and other must have, shared, high availability data.
There are different tools for different jobs, that’s fine.
I venture a guess that for each sqlite db holding important work data, you have dozens or hundreds of traditional db datasets, that are critical to your work. And yes, I mean your bank, but also messaging apps, online services.
If you backup your hard drive in the cloud at all, you are already depending on trad dbs for the very use case supposedly highlighting your dependence on sqlite.
So is contacts list, sms messages, Whatsapp data, browser data etc etc. whese are separate installations of sqlite, hundreds per phone. And they ARE important, at least to me.
My contacts are stored in my sim chip or google(server), also they are shared with many apps (server), whatsapp msgs are backed up to google drive (server), and itself stored on server side whatsapp servers.
Broswer data is sqlite yes, but it is also flushed every couple of months, and is by design ephemeral.