The reason why save scumming is a problem is that
given the opportunity players will optimise the fun right out of a game. There's no point putting points into conversation skills if players never fail a conversation check because success is just a quick press of F9 away. It's not really a minority most people will end up acting this way when you make reloading to avoid ever suffering consequences too easy.
But how does it affect your single player game if someone else does this in their single player game? Some people do it way too much but they do not make us do it as well.
Did you check out the link I posted? Because that's really not the point I'm making. The point I'm trying to make is it's risky to let people choose to make the experience less enjoyable for themselves. What is the correct amount of save scumming? I think it should be pretty much zero, if people are reloading to deal with bugs or have either died or backed them into an unwinnable situation that's fine. If people are reloading to get out of suffering negative consequences then I'd argue that's pretty much always a problem. If the game can prevent or disicentivise this it won't affect people who don't use saves in this way and will improve the game for people who do.
The upside is if people are using save scumming to get around other design flaws. This isn't an ideal situation but shouldn't be completely ignored. If there's no interesting consequences for failing actions and important plot points are permanently locked behind skill checks. This is an old GM rule of thumb of "don't make players roll dice unless you're prepared for them to fail" The game shouldn't be worse if players fail a check. If it is then save scumming isn't the solution, instead skill checks need to be revised or removed.
The other upside is what about players who just don't ever want to suffer bad consequences? If we can trust players to make this decision (which is risky) then save scumming is a really inelegant solution. Maybe we can give players infinite inspiration, or have an option for it. We can make NPCs immune to death or able to be targetted by revivify or raise dead. This has the dual advantage of making fixing these problems simpler and making it explicit to the player what they are choosing. Players tend to have a lot more resistance to selecting an easy mode than making the game easier by abusing saves.
