it isnt about "to the core", there are obviously non associative things that should be warned as such, but seeing as you use photoshop as an example

edit a photoshop file, quit, it will warn you to save changes blah blah, it is annoying, but also stops you deleting stuff, load it again, history is lost

Use lightroom, another adobe product for editing photos, edit a photo, quit, no dialog, its already saved, open the file again, and the history is preserved

its a much nicer experience in a lot of situations