I agree it's less obviously correct, but I bet you could add the extension to sqlite if you feel strongly about it. As an aside '%y' is documented to only work in sqlite for years >= 0000 and <= 9999, so it would behave exactly the same as the code you wrote. especially because you already didn't have to worry about years less than 1000 because the ISO8601 format used for serializing dates in sqlite normalizes them with leading zeros.
for instance `select date(-50000000000, "unixepoch");` returns `0385-07-25`
Interestingly %Y doesn't seem to handle negative dates either if you need to handle BC, so I guess that is one downside for both. This is one reason I sometimes prefer to use low level code even when it is less obviously correct with a cursory glance, because abstractions may not mean what you think they mean, or even worse, may be lying to you. At least with low level code I can reason about how it would behave under certain edge cases I might care about.
for instance `select date(-50000000000, "unixepoch");` returns `0385-07-25`
Interestingly %Y doesn't seem to handle negative dates either if you need to handle BC, so I guess that is one downside for both. This is one reason I sometimes prefer to use low level code even when it is less obviously correct with a cursory glance, because abstractions may not mean what you think they mean, or even worse, may be lying to you. At least with low level code I can reason about how it would behave under certain edge cases I might care about.