As chris asked, do you have anything in the file /etc/pf.garbage.txt?
Perhaps you are misunderstanding how "persist" works, and how "file" works?
The "persist" adjective is not about classic object persistence, all it does is ensure that even if no current rules are using a table, that table still gets allocated. It's mostly useful when you are dynamically adding rules with anchors and know you will refer to a table in a future dynamic rule, even though no current rule uses that table.
PF will never writeto the file, it only reads from the file, and that only once at the time the rules are loaded/reloaded.
If you want to save the table contents to a file and have them survive across rule reloading and across reboots, you need a separate userland script to handle this activity.
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