Sounds like programmers with sovereign citizen approach

What happen when the repository is getting forked? Goofing with the license is all haha fun till nasty lawyers get into the picture and you get all sort of liability claims

Keeping the chicken in the oven could lead to nasty bugs

It all depends on the task you are currently doing and how good your managers are. A good one can understand the need to have a quiet time to concentrate on the task, and another will insists of micromanage you to death. Worked with both types.

It all depends on the implementation and need.

In-memory structures are usually faster to work with, but harder to coordinate multiple updates from multiple sources (different applications, services, etc).

Databases have all sort of failsafe mechanisms to ensure data integrity and recovery options, in most times there is no need to reinvent it all over again.

Persistent - do you need to access the data again once your program was finished? How often does the data change by other programs/tasks once you read it? How big is your data and how complex are the connections between your data objects?

Many times the implementation is a mixed approach. It is better to know and calculate the needs before you start your project, but as it usually happen, once you get performance issues, you start optimizing adding in-memory cache or scale to a bigger database.

So solid, liquid, gas, and missing plasma. You just need to have a really big bang and any of the other vehicles will do