git's error reporting and command line are not exactly friendly, but reliability and friendliness are orthogonal.

So git crashed and burned. Was anything corrupted?

Now for a question. Say, Mr. Evil Gamma Ray flipped one bit on your data somewhere. Git is guaranteed to detected this. SQLite is unlikely to. There's an actual reliability difference here, and it is in Git's favor.

EDIT: Just to point out: fossil does keep SHA1 hashes of everything, so it can find problems just as well as git does - but sqlite itself generally cannot.