You reminded me of a project I came into like that, a long time ago. Reason? One of the directors wanted to be able to install this web app on his laptap, but

You reminded me of a project I came into like that, a long time ago. Reason? One of the directors wanted to be able to install this web app on his laptap, but it already had to much crap on there, and he didn't want to install a database. So we had to use files. No, this web app was going to be installed on a proper web server. He just might want it on his laptop too. You know, just in case. Weird thing was, later we had to do various indexing stuff .... so we just put a database in. The files were still the source of truth, the database was more like a caching layer.