I avoided DBs like the plague early in my career, in favor of serialized formats on disk. I still think there's a lot of merit to that, but at this point in my career I see a lot more use case for sqlite and the relational features it comes with. At the least, I've spent a lot less time chasing down data corruption bugs since changing philosophy.

Now that said, if there's value to the "database" being human readable/editable, json is still well worth a consideration. Dealing with even sqlite is a pain in the ass when you just need to tweak or read something, especially if you're not the dev.