What happens to a node if .bitcoin/chainstate is corrupted?
I found an answer by Pieter Wuille to another question that seems to be relevant here. The relevant part states:


  "Please don't go download a chainstate from a random place on the Internet though. They can introduce arbitrarily many coins assigned to themselves, and your client would accept them. If many people started running nodes using the same chainstate 'copy' such transactions could even get into blocks, and cause forks in the best case, and theft in the worst case."


So, this seems to indicate that a node will simply not realize that its chainstate is modified.