Also, while I get the appeal of just storing it all in a giant JSON, I don't really feel that's the final word in simple storage formats. I'd personally just use SQLite, or some other format I could rsync.
Are you just looking for keywords? That's not how a quality security review should be done.
> I don't see any reason to use a tool that's not AEAD.
Do you have an actual attack? Non AEAD schemes have been used for decades without any attack.
There might be entirely valid complaints against this. Lack of AEAD is not one...
> I don't really feel that's the final word in simple storage formats.
Literally nobody said it was
> I'd personally just use SQLite, or some other format I could rsync.
You can rsync a JSON file just as you can rsync a SQLite file....