[beetwenty]

That's a data synchronization error across multiple related pieces of data, which isn't the same as a POD container like a hashtable corrupting itself.

The standard hammer you would apply to enforce the synchronization in all cases is relational integrity, which is too expensive for a game's runtime environment. You don't always want to synchronize everything all of the time if you want to hit a high framerate target, and a lot of performance features boil down to relaxations on when synchronization occurs. Much of the detailed design in writing a game main loop is in dealing with the many consequences of supporting that.

That's why their recommendations on errors also refer to the earlier build process and Lua integration; by the time the data hits the inner loops of the engine, there shouldn't be a case where it's invalid, because if it is, then you can't have the optimized version either.