So the thing is, different KV stores have different trade-offs, and for now we haven't yet found one that has the best of all worlds.

We do recommend SQLite in our quick-start guide to setup a single-node deployment for small/moderate workloads, and it works fine. The "real world deployment" guide recommends LMDB because it gives much better performance (with the current status of Garage, not to say that this couldn't be improved), and the risk of critical data loss is mitigated by the fact that such a deployment would use multi-node replication, meaning that the data can always be recovered from another replica if one node is corrupted and no snapshot is available. Maybe this should be worded better, I can see that the alarmist wording of the deployment guide is creating quite a debate so we probably need to make these facts clearer.

We are also experimenting Fjall as an alternate KV engine based on LSM, as it theoretically has good speed and crash resilience, which would make it the best option. We are just not recommending it by default yet, as we don't have much data to confirm that it works up to these expectations.