So don't upgrade it. Export it to an agnostic format and re-import it in the new version. Since it's failing to upgrade, it must be a metadata issue, not a data issue, so removing the Blender-specific bits will fix it.

What a silly hypothetical. There's a myriad freak occurrences that could make you have to redo work that you don't worry about. Now, I'm not saying single-bit errors don't happen. They just typically don't result in the sort of cascading failure you're describing.

Doing a lossy export/reimport process probably isn't going to be viable on something like a big movie scene blender file with lots of constraints, scripted modifiers and stuff that doesn't automatically come through with an export to USD.

My point is that there are scenarios where corruption in the past puts you in a bind and can cause a lot of loss of work or expensive diagnostic and recovery process long after it first occurred, blender was just one example but it can be much worse with proprietary software binary formats where you don't have any chance of jumping into the debugger to figure out what's going wrong with an upgrade or export. And maybe the subscription version of it won't even let you go back to the old version.

> There's a myriad freak occurrences that could make you have to redo work that you don't worry about.

Yes other sources of corruption are more likely from things like software errors. It's not that you wouldn't worry about them if you had unlimited budget and could have people audit the code etc., but you do have a budget and ECC is much cheaper relative to that. That doesn't mean it always makes sense for everyone to pay more for ECC. But I can see why people working on gigantic CAD files for nuclear reactor design, etc. tend to have workstations with ECC.