It's astonishing to me how difficult it (still) is to design a syncable local-first data model.
I keep thinking I've found a decent way, then realizing its flaws, then despondently noticing that the flaws were already discussed in Ink & Switch's article: inkandswitch.com/local-first.ht
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Arguably things are even worse than discussed in that article. Take Firebase, for instance: it implements offline caching, but that's very different from sync. You have to design a whole replication strategy on top to get something like "a synced file format."
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CouchDB seems like the closest solution, if you can design a conflict-free model. But I spent the last week getting into the details of actually operating a multi-user service, and I am now quite thoroughly spooked!
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I've noticed that a lot of modern solutions to this problem assume that it's viable to read the entire data store from disk into memory on load (and, often, write the entire thing on save)—which I guess is a nice simplifying assumption… but quite limiting!
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Microsoft sync framework (for all of its flaws) had so much of this solved 10+ years ago but because it’s such a complex problem, solving it generally like MSF did required a complex solution.