I would agree with you on rules point... at least relatively recently so once instead of triggers for views were on the scene... but I see some fairly robust use of the object-relational features and don't see much downplaying of them. Mind you, that doesn't mean they're necessarily commonplace (or necessarily should be)...
My guess is the audience here on HN is less likely to run into these features in their day-to-day lives. By my observations, the HN audience tends to be generalist developer types that will readily just hand off database specialization to the most popular ORM layer for their first class development environment. And I would agree they'll not encounter these things... and if they do, they'll largely be annoyances.
I work in "enterprise" type software and I see and do a lot of specifically database development (for PostgreSQL usually these days). If we consider PostgreSQL's type system as part of the object-relational feature set, I find I make use of that fairly frequently, for example compound types... also understanding that object-relational shouldn't be confused with "object-oriented". In my own work it's primarily the more advanced typing that shows up in both procedural code I write as well as queries in certain cases. Less so, though not completely absent is the inheritance feature; there are uses for it for sure, but a rather narrow set of cases (I mean outside of partitioning, which is the most common use case).
Anyway... I'm not so sure it's really a matter of downplayed as much as it is less generally understood as PostgreSQL has become more popular.
My guess is the audience here on HN is less likely to run into these features in their day-to-day lives. By my observations, the HN audience tends to be generalist developer types that will readily just hand off database specialization to the most popular ORM layer for their first class development environment. And I would agree they'll not encounter these things... and if they do, they'll largely be annoyances.
I work in "enterprise" type software and I see and do a lot of specifically database development (for PostgreSQL usually these days). If we consider PostgreSQL's type system as part of the object-relational feature set, I find I make use of that fairly frequently, for example compound types... also understanding that object-relational shouldn't be confused with "object-oriented". In my own work it's primarily the more advanced typing that shows up in both procedural code I write as well as queries in certain cases. Less so, though not completely absent is the inheritance feature; there are uses for it for sure, but a rather narrow set of cases (I mean outside of partitioning, which is the most common use case).
Anyway... I'm not so sure it's really a matter of downplayed as much as it is less generally understood as PostgreSQL has become more popular.