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I agree that databases on their own are never tamper resistant. But you can certainly set up a process around the database that guarantees tamper resistance. You'll still have to trust said process, and with blockchain you still have to trust the code. You'll never get away from having to trust _something_, but at least it is in theory feasible to have tamper resistance both with a centralised database and with a blockchain.

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in practice, there's a difference between "our SREs and management promise to not change anything" and "it would cost x billion dollars to replace this record with a different one, based on previous attacks we've observed"

> "our SREs and management promise to not change anything"

But you can lock a database down to the point where only external auditors have access to the admin keys. It would make debugging challenging for sure, but that's anyway a tricky part of distributed systems such as bitcoin.

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