To be more specific, goals of perfection where perfection does not at all matter.

What does bothering to read some distributed systems literature have to do with demanding unnecessary perfection? Did NATS have in their docs that JetStream accepted split brain conditions as a reality, or that metadata corruption could silently delete a topic? You could maybe argue the fsync default was a tradeoff, though I think it’s a bad one (not the existence of the flag, just the default being “false”). The rest are not the kind of bugs you expect to see in a 5 year old persistence layer.

Last time I was at school requirement analysis was a thing, but do go off.