The lived experience you talk about is that this is a difficult problem without a solution, not a different solution that I dismissed. What I dismissed is the problem.
How do we solve X? You don't solve X, you solve Y. The XY problem, not Chesterton's Fence.
Not sure I follow you entirely on user data. There's user data that absolutely requires an audit trail, like subscriptions or orders. There's user data that might start out as null and eventually transition to an inane value, like avatar or self-description. You don't need complex merge rules for that data. It possibly only happens when their account is being hacked and that's not the data you need in that particular situation, yeah?
How do we solve X? You don't solve X, you solve Y. The XY problem, not Chesterton's Fence.
Not sure I follow you entirely on user data. There's user data that absolutely requires an audit trail, like subscriptions or orders. There's user data that might start out as null and eventually transition to an inane value, like avatar or self-description. You don't need complex merge rules for that data. It possibly only happens when their account is being hacked and that's not the data you need in that particular situation, yeah?