Good point!

I'm not sure if there are any databases that do your 'with a lot of care' option, but for anyone curious about what that might look like in practice there are file systems that forgo write-ahead logging and maintain metadata consistency using techniques like soft updates[0] or copy-on-write up to a root[1].

[0]: https://www.usenix.org/conference/1999-usenix-annual-technic... [1]: https://www.cs.hmc.edu/~rhodes/courses/cs134/fa20/readings/T... (yes, ZFS can be configured to use a WAL too for durability)