This is not the state of mind right now - and this is the same thing that blockchain devs seem to think. Everybody uses the cloud for anything reasonably import

This is not the state of mind right now - and this is the same thing that blockchain devs seem to think. Everybody uses the cloud for anything reasonably important. And if it is not important, the difficulty delta between an embedded datastore and "./redis" is miniscule. Which means that leveldb/rocksdb gives zero path to scalability at the cost of saving a maximum of a few minutes of effort. At worst, this could have been done in redis with embedded lua packaged together. That would have solved both your external redis problem as well as a reasonable path to scale.