Comment by avar

The inherent issue is that there's a huge performance benefit to be gained by batching updates. FS safety will always come at the cost of performance.

The article doesn't say but I suspect most of the issues it mentions can be mitigated by mounting with the "sync" and "dirsync" options, but that absolutely kills performance.

The APIs involved could definitely be friendlier, but the app developer is using an API that's explicitly performance oriented by default at the cost of safety, and needs to opt-in to get safer writes. Whether the default should be the other way around is one matter, but ultimately someone has to pick which one they want and live with the consequences.