Consul is much older than 4 years old (public availability in 2014; 1.0 release in 2017, with a lot of sites using 0.x in production long before). And the fact that they didn't encounter this pathological case until Q4 2021 tells us that they got a lot of useful life out of BoltDB. They also were planning to switch over to bbolt back in 2020[1].

The developers at Hashicorp are top-tier, and this doesn't substantially change their reputation in my eyes. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Let's end this thread; blaming doesn't help anyone.

[1] https://github.com/hashicorp/consul/issues/8442