Thanks for the link, I watched it for myself and wrote a fuller transcript.
Q: If a young developer said they wanted to fork SQLite and build something better, what would you tell them?
A: ... lots of people have tried. You're welcome to try. I think that the time has passed; it takes twenty five years, and it takes maniacal devotion to the cause.
This transcript doesn't include the hesitation, pauses, repeated words, incredulity etc. I got the vibe of beware wasted effort not an enthusiastic go do it quip.
Checksums use CPU cycles. SQLite will do checksums with an extension (https://sqlite.org/cksumvfs.html) but that is off by default since an overwhelming majority of developers are more interested in day-to-day performance than detecting (very rare) storage malfunctions.
I wonder if something changed, with todays SSDs, memory bottlenecked CPUs, and hardware accelerated CRCs.
FWIW, RAM bit-flips are much more common today, on consumer devices where SQLite is used a lot, since today's memory operates at the limit (see RowHammer).
