Still, given the strategy at hand, the in-memory JS object (exclusively single-threaded) is the source of truth, and just gets mirrored in the file system (and doesn't get read again until the next startup). So you should have an eventual-consistency situation in the worst case (any racing issue between file-writes would just put the file in a stale state, and the next file-write would bring it back up to consistency)

Are you sure? I thought it could be if the first write had more data than the size of the kernel/fs-driver buffer, not all of it would be written, and then it could be interrupted when another thread calls write() with a small buffer that gets written in one go.

You maybe thinking of stdio buffering, where calls to printf etc get split into multiple write calls. Then in those cases, it's possible to get errant interleaved writes.