This is basically what I was considering.

The design of Duplicati is such that the local database is not needed, so from a design perspective, you should not have to do so.
In the past, there has been complaints that the recreate database was really slow, and in some cases failed, requiring the use of the recovery tool to get data out.
From another post:
Did it wind up reading all the dblock files (ouch)?
Given that it took:
Start 2025-04-01 14:52:13 End 2025-04-03 16:26:17
(i.e. 2 days and 1.5 hours) I’m pretty sure it downloaded all of the files.
IIRC this is about how long it took on the first failed attempt as well, although this time the end result is MUCH better.
So the database recreate was really slow, and the clean-up has resulted in issues that have not yet been solved.

Happily corrected, but I do not believe any of these concerns are valid anymore.
As a user, I consider these concerns to still be valid.