I thinnk the Barrelmancy issue is actually slightly different because the barrels are actual gameplay elements consciously left throughout the gameworld and they're meant to be used in-game, whereas the save function is just a technical convention of these kinds of games and exist in basically all RPGs.
Yeah, save scumming is going to happen no matter what. Designing ways to discourage it is a complete waste of time at best, unless it's a major part of your design philosophy. Solasta actually used to preserve random seed by default, following the lead of games like Fire Emblem and XCOM. People
hated it in Solasta because unlike those other two games, Solasta had dialogue skill checks and failing those always meant you were forced to murderhobo someone. Then they introduced an option to turn that off, but preserving was still the default option. Then they had it turned off by default afterwards, because most people didn't know that option existed and what it meant.
Though while your topic of barrelmancy is valid too, I personally don't see it as that much of a problem, as it could be easily fixed by just increasing their weight to the point where you can't put them in your inventory period. Even if nothing happens to the barrels, it's not a core mechanic, you actually CAN just ignore them as people like to argue, as it's not like enemies are picking them up to nuke your whole party at once either. In that respect, I'd have bigger problems with the frequency of throwable flasks and special arrows than barrels, as enemies
do use those.
You can't really ignore height/backstab advantage and disadvantage though.
