And they tacked on Litestream, which made for far more interesting failure modes. Hopefully they ran their jepson... oh wait, no they didn't really care about the reasons they ruled out traditional db choices.

Do you understand how Litestream works? What's the Jepson test you'd do here, to make sure your single, statically assigned leader isn't conflicting with... itself? All Litestream does is ship WAL segments. The whole point of this design is not having the distributed consensus problems (and concomitant schema and development inflexibility) that etcd has.