So imagine you have generations of digital files, converted from format to format to format. Why? Because software engineers are assholes who keep inventing new formats, for stupid goddamn reasons. A hundred generations from now, you'll be looking at copies of copies of copies which aren't just checksumable bit-wise copies but transcriptions, with transcription errors. If our descendants are lucky, all of those different versions will be preserved as well, but that just means that if you notice a possible transcription error, you'll have the opportunity to dig into two hundred year old character and file encodings to try to figure out what the original text was.

Which is not that different of a situation from trying to guess whether a scribe three copies ago misread the scribe four copies ago's atrocious f for a t.