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Serious question, why are people here acting as if formatted files are somehow more reliable than a DB? That just simply isn't true. For most of software development's history, using flat files for persistence of data was the wrong thing to do with good reason. Flat files can easily be corrupted, and that happens much more often than a DB gets corrupted. The reason you might think otherwise is just sampling bias.

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I do believe that you are missing a healthy dose of sarcasm. Such as faking downloads to give yourself inflated statistics so that your employer will trust untested and AI-written garbage.

That said, there really are good use cases for readable formatted files. For example configuration files that are checked into source control are far more trackable than a SQLite database for the same purpose. For another example, the files are convenient for a lot of data transfer purposes.

But for updateable data? You need a really good reason not to simply use a database. I've encountered such edge cases. But I've encountered a lot more people who thought that they had an edge case, than really did.

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