I really struggled with this, but its better than a soft lock! And the only way to trigger that is by a destructive action, deleting something that is critical to winning.
If something can cause softlock it doesn't mean it should lead to full game reset. In this case dev could either prevent player from deleting important file or change the punish into 5-15 minutes progress reset. The game wasn't established as "super hardcore game where you should be very careful for every action", it just incremental, it has no reason to have a such cruel punishment.