Microsoft is large and software quality varies. For instance look a Skype, they failed to use their own GUI frameworks and are using Electron i.e. Google Chrome to paint a few controls.

> I think JET just isn’t that robust against that.

I think it is, it's mentioned everywhere:

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/extensible-st...

https://stackoverflow.com/a/2369220/126995

Like they say,

In theory, there’s no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.

Here’s a list of things that can go wrong (here in the context of domain controllers):

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/windows-server...

Some of them are just the unavoidable hardware failures, for others they suggest ‘Deploy the OS on server-class hardware’. Or the always helpful ‘restore from backup’. Not quite reasonable for a database containing a search index on a consumer device.

That article was written because DC is a business-critical infrastructure. Here’s a comparable one about Oracle: https://docs.oracle.com/cd/A87860_01/doc/server.817/a76965/c...

NTFS: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/previous-versions/windows/i...

> Not quite reasonable for a database containing a search index on a consumer device.

Before I switched to MS Outlook, I was using Windows live mail (now discontinued) as an e-mail client for a decade or so, it used ESENT for everything.

When I run process explorer and search for “esent.dll”, it finds a dozen of system services using ESENT databases, many of them critical like CryptSvc.

I try to buy good hardware, but that’s not server-grade components. I don’t use ECC RAM nor a UPS, and I suffer from brief power outages couple times a year. If ESENT would be corrupting databases when the power is turned off suddenly, I would have noticed.

Experiments with a larger sample size show a different result.