The usual way to talk about the modern trend of filesystems with inherent checksums (such as ZFS and btrfs) is to say that the checksums exist to detect data corruption in your files (and in the filesystem as a whole). In an environment with a certain amount of random bit flips, decaying media, periodic hardware glitches, and other sources of damage, it's no longer good enough to imagine that if you wrote it to disk you're sure to read it back perfectly (or to get a disk error). Filesystems with checksums are sentinels, standing on guard for you and letting you know when this has happened to your data.

But this is not quite what they do in practice (generally). This is because they perform this sentinel duty by denying you access to your data. In doing this they implicitly prioritize integrity over availability; better to not give you data at all than to give you data that at least seems damaged. The same is true but even more so if filesystem metadata seems damaged.

(This is similar to the tradeoff disk encryption makes for you.)

You may not be exactly happy with this tradeoff. Yes, it's nice to know if you're reading corrupt data, but sometimes you really want to see that data anyways just to see if you can reconstruct something. This goes even more so for filesystem metadata, especially core metadata; it's not hard to get into a situation where almost all of your data is intact and probably recoverable but the filesystem won't give it to you.

Old filesystems went the other way, and not just by not having any sort of checksums; they often came with quite elaborate recovery tools that would do almost everything they could to get something back. The results might be scattered in little incoherent bits all over the filesystem, but if you cared enough (ie it was important enough), you had a shot at assembling what you could.

(This is still theoretically possible with modern checksumming filesystems but at least some of them are very strongly of the opinion that the answer here is 'restore from backups (of course you have backups)' and so they don't supply any real sort of tools to help you out.)

My opinion is that filesystems ought to support an interface that allows you to get access to even data that fails checksums (perhaps through a special 'no error on checksum error' flag for open()). This wouldn't fix all of the problems (since it wouldn't help in the face of many metadata issues) but it would at least be something and a gesture to agreeing that integrity is not always the most important thing.