I left that bit of information out of the post but I actually had a copy of the Keychains directory before I mv-ed login-1.keychain-db to login.keychain-db.
Since that confirmed my hunch it probably gave the sense I was confident in moving instead of renaming.
The article was based on the heat or in the panic of the situation where i need to get work done for which i was being paid and also my search results on the icloud/keychain recovery didnt yield any useful the results.
Author of the blogpost here:
Firstly didnt expect anyone would read my blog post (Atleast not this soon) let alone someone posting a link on hackernews.
Yeah I realized while i was writing that if somehow that (my assumption about master key) did happen then it would be bad press and completely destroy Apples reputation for a privacy first. At the same time for an usecase like mine where i want my work isolated from personal it is weird that without proper way to get the data back they would allow this to happen. I mean if i really didnt remember my password then my keychain data would have been gone without which lot of work related info would have been hard to recover.
Ubuntu is great option if you dont like to fiddle but if you are feeling adventurous then arch is great.
I think people have misconception anout arch and rolling distro to mean that the you will always have things breaking and you need to keep reinstalling or fiddling. I have been on arch for more than 10 years now and i have never had any issues. I would say i had a pretty rock solid os. Only times i had to reinstall was user issue when i did something stupid and wanted a fresh start.
Void is also a great option if you are anti systemd :P