It sounds like those incidents were 20 years ago, though? I've heard similar stories from that era, but the rpmdb getting corrupted hasn't been a prevalent issue for a long time.
The last one was at work with RHEL 10 years ago, it has been long enough I should consider trying an RPM distribution again. Debian based distributions as far as the package repository hasn't give me issues but maybe RPM issues have been sorted out, good point.