By that line of reasoning, no feature could ever be merged in a filesystem. You simply cannot prove complex code has no bugs. Testing increases confidence that code may be stable, but that isn't a certainty as there's no guarantee that testing exercises all possible conditions. I know as code I've written that stood up to a lot of testing has resulted in data loss when a series of very complex conditions aligned to trigger a corner case.

Bugs are a fact of life. Bug fixes are a fact of life. Sometimes those bugs will cause data loss. Adding code in and -rc to support data recovery when a bug caused data loss to occur is a good thing for users. Portraying it as a bad thing is the worst kind of bike shedding.