It is the better solution because it delineates the difference between important data that must be preserved, and not important data that can be thrown out and

It is the better solution because it delineates the difference between important data that must be preserved, and not important data that can be thrown out and regenerated (turning it off and on again). Systems that eliminate this difference massively increase the damage surface of your data by forcing both kinds to be treated equally and even intermix. And since software will always have bugs, your fallout damage increases exponentially. It's a lot like naive state saving code that just dumps an in-memory struct to disk: The moment that struct changes (adding/removing/changing a type or size), your load code breaks.