Is there an existing issue for this?

• I have searched the existing issues

Current behaviour

I randomly encountered this by loading a wallet created from master with an older version. I could trace it down to bd13dc2 (#26076), but I don't know descriptor wallets enough to understand what's going on (cc @Sjors @achow101).

Expected behaviour

bitcoind starts, or at least tells me to use a later version if #26076 was a breaking change instead of corrupting wallet.dat.

Steps to reproduce

(master, clean chain):
createwallet -regtest ""
(v25.0rc2):
first bitcoind -regtest succeeds
then stop and restart the node: The second bitcoind -regtest leads to an InitError:
Error: Error: Unable to expand wallet descriptor from cache
now, the wallet cannot be loaded by either version.

Relevant log output

No response

How did you obtain Bitcoin Core

Compiled from source

What version of Bitcoin Core are you using?

v25.0rc2 / master

Operating system and version

Ubuntu

Machine specifications

No response