The persistence has multiple downsides.

The biggest for me was, that old sensor values are reported as new when restarting home assistant.

The downside is, that the presentation of your nodes has to be more robust. If you use persistence, you do not notice if your nodes only present at startup. Without persistence, they will not reappear in HA, if they only present once after powering on.

This might have changed meanwhile.

Perhaps you are also affected from

https://www.home-assistant.io/blog/2020/01/15/release-104/#improved-entity-handling-on-startup

I am currently not running the latest HA version.

Regards
Leonard