The main feature of CSV is that it's aways broken, not that it's almost trivial.

> with one that requires a specific 85 kLOC codebase to access

sqlite is available essentially everywhere. Every browser uses sqlite extensively internally, so do tons of other software on your standard desktop machine (to say nothing of mobile OS where it's ubiquitous). Using sqlite is not any sort of constraint.

> SQLite is wonderful, but it's definitely not a replacement for CSV

Only in the sense that it's nowhere near as bad and annoying as CSV.