I'm mostly with you here... it's amazing how many devs don't have a certain amount of baseline knowledge to understand file-io, let alone thin abstractions for custom data and indexing like tfa. Then again, most devs also don't understand the impacts of database normalization under load either.
Overhead in any project is understanding it and onboarding new people to it. Keeping on "mainline" path is key to lower friction here. All 3 languages have well supported ORM that supports SQLite.