I don’t have an official answer, only a few observations:
I updated us quickly to 1.18.1 immediately based on claims that it would ease the transition between epoch boundaries and didn’t want to be responsible for any disruption in the network at that time. That claim was retracted soon afterward, people were cautioned not to install it, but we didn’t see the retraction for about 24 hours and continued syncing our DB for a while longer before eventually switching back to our previously 1.18.0 binaries.
The rest of that epoch was fine but then our relay nodes died in last night’s epoch boundary… the one after the one with the dire predictions, as we reported today here and on Github.
We have only been able to begin re-syncing our nodes after deleting our --database-path directory and starting over, which is taking far, far longer than when we originally set up our nodes, also with 1.18.0: at the rate it’s going now, our nodes still might not have reached the current tip by the expected release of 1.19.0 some time tomorrow (our last bootstraps from genesis on brand new servers took between 4.5 and 8 hours).
So we are in a situation where we will need the great speed improvement that has been promised. Having a base from which a relay could be rebuilt from scratch very quickly would be a great advantage of the new software.
But if I could do it over again I would have backed up the --database-path directory when we moved the 1.18.0 cardano-node out of the way, and kept them together somehow… so the old database directory could be reinstated along with the old node binary if the new node didn’t work. We would still be regenerating now after the corrupted databases, but we would be doing so from a checkpoint much farther along in the blockchain.