Mineclone2 is an absolute masterpiece of a game for Minetest IMO

So does Scrap Mechanic (sandbox game that's basically Space Engineers on the ground -- or, more loosely, Minecraft but with physics and you can build cars) also uses sqlite to save worlds. It also uses uncompressed JSON files to store user creations.

Thanks for the hint. I had to look that up. (The linked page is worth a read and has lots of details and caveats.)

The scope is narrow, and well documented. Be very wary of over generalizing.

The measurements in this article were made during the week of 2017-06-05 using a version of SQLite in between 3.19.2 and 3.20.0. You may expect future versions of SQLite to perform even better.

https://www.sqlite.org/fasterthanfs.html

SQLite reads and writes small blobs (for example, thumbnail images) 35% faster¹ than the same blobs can be read from or written to individual files on disk using fread() or fwrite().

Furthermore, a single SQLite database holding 10-kilobyte blobs uses about 20% less disk space than storing the blobs in individual files.)

Edit 5: consolidated my edits.