Editing the registry never results in corrupt unreadable intermediate states, unlike writing to config files. A workaround is "atomic save" (where one app writes to a different filename and renames it over the original). This ensures you'll never get torn reads (I think the Windows registry doesn't support transactional/atomic updates of multiple values at once), but you lose permissions and symlinks or something like that.
Have you never experienced an unbootable system because of a corrupted registry? It's unfixable. And I'm not saying it happens when manually editing the registry. It might happen when Windows crashes at the wrong time and the system is in the middle of modifying it. It's quite failure-prone and I'm surprised it hasn't been improved much over the past decades.
Somehow I've never gotten a corrupted registry resulting in a broken account or system. Perhaps I'm lucky or too innocent in this regard. Though it does sound concerning if the Windows registry doesn't perform write-ahead logging like SQLite or a client-server database to enable crash recovery.
I should research what key-value database libraries I can use as a cross-platform registry-like storage format that's more resilient to app or system crashes.
