We could go on like this all day. But in the end if it works it works.

That's true. but as we're talking about the ideas I got fun and Siwler can get inspiration. :-)

Out of curiosity have you made a large game using this approach

No. Some years ago I did a quick prototype with this with only three levels. I got inspired when System Shock 2 was released. They had this feature that you could use bulks to switch levels and whatever you did was saved. There were not many games at that time which allowed you to go back to some place you already visited before.

Back in the old days with c-script I would agree with this approach. With structs it would be simpler to make a struct to handle the info needed to be saved and then make one per level as needed.