Linux, meet the Registry

For computers yes, for human this is very different, that's the point!

If you have a corrupted binary, it's very, very difficult for an human to fix it (unless there's a tool which fix it "auto-magically"), whereas for a text there is still the possibility for the human to fix it.

A FS is a database, fsck is the tool to fix it (up to a point), if you add other databases in a FS this add the possibility of additional errors fixable only by the tools, with structured text files (JSON is nice: easy to read and to parse) you have the best of both worlds.