Currently the mempool isn't persisted across restarts. The historical argument against doing this is that it would make transactions immortal. Expiration now addresses that issue.

Without preserving the mempool node behavior changes drastically across restarts which complicates production use (e.g. mining overly small/low fee blocks) as well as development testing. The lack of retention also causes the loss of txn priority modifications made with prioritisetransaction which makes the API less reliable.

{
    
    if (fCheckPOW && !CheckProofOfWork(block.GetHash(), block.nBits, consensusParams))
        return state.DoS(50, false, REJECT_INVALID, "high-hash", false, "proof of work failed");
    return true;
}
bool CheckBlock(const CBlock& block, CValidationState& state, const Consensus::Params& consensusParams, bool fCheckPOW, bool fCheckMerkleRoot)
{
    
    if (block.fChecked)
        return true;
    
    
    if (!CheckBlockHeader(block, state, consensusParams, fCheckPOW))
        return false;
    
    if (fCheckMerkleRoot) {
        bool mutated;
        uint256 hashMerkleRoot2 = BlockMerkleRoot(block, &mutated);
        if (block.hashMerkleRoot != hashMerkleRoot2)
            return state.DoS(100, false, REJECT_INVALID, "bad-txnmrklroot", true, "hashMerkleRoot mismatch");
        
        
        
        if (mutated)
            return state.DoS(100, false, REJECT_INVALID, "bad-txns-duplicate", true, "duplicate transaction");
    }