>It almost always does. People put so much effort into building layers of abstractions to avoid using SQL, while just writing it directly would be much faster, easier, more readable, easier to maintain, modify, and debug. I do not get it.

When your data is literally hierarchical and all you need to do is read/write one Big Object, "just using SQL" makes no sense.

I used SQLite because it makes a lot of sense to use as an application file format[1], i.e. as an alternative to writing directly to the filesystem.

The hierarchical data was a mix of parameters and huge blobs, so text-based JSON was a no-go, size-limited BSON was a no-go, at which point I asked myself if there was a reason to not just use SQLite, and found none.

[1] https://sqlite.org/appfileformat.html