Not a dumb question at all! We're aware of cr-sqlite and I've talked to the author, Matt, a few times. Short answer: SQLite has serious shortcomings when it comes to reactivity and we think we can be as fast as SQLite for the application-type queries we aim to support. The long answer would be about supporting all of features we don't need in SQLite and all of the quirks that come with it like having null as a primary key[1].

We also recently came up with a relational-style querying system without joins! https://twitter.com/triplit_dev/status/1707509447789043760

[1] https://twitter.com/tantaman/status/1702677401291903116