I think that the key point being made by this crowd, of which I'm one, is somewhere in the middle. The way I mean it is "Make Postgres your default choice. Also *you* probably aren't doing anything special enough to warrant using something different".
In other words, there are people and situations where it makes sense to use something else. But most people believing they're in that category are wrong.
> Also you probably aren't doing anything special enough to warrant using something different".
I always get frustrated by this because it is never made clear where the transition occurs to where you are doing something special enough. It is always dismissed as, "well whatever it is you are doing, I am sure you don't need it"
Why is this assumption always made, especially on sites like HackerNews? There are a lot of us here that DO work with scales and workloads that require specialized things, and we want to be able to talk about our challenges and experiences, too. I don't think we need to isolate all the people who work at large scales to a completely separate forum; for one thing, a lot of us work on a variety of workloads, where some are big enough and particular enough to need a different technology, and some that should be in Postgres. I would love to be able to talk about how to make that decision, but it is always just "nope, you aren't big enough to need anything else"
I was not some super engineer who already knew everything when I started working on large enough data pipelines that I needed specialized software, with horizontal scaling requirements. Why can't we also talk about that here?
Nothing about my post indicated that these things shouldn't be talked about and discussed. It's worth understanding how things work, even things that one personally need to use. Continue to stash ideas away and add them to your future bag of tricks. The key issue here is that people need to be more critical and self-aware of the space where their problems lie, and not assume that because something is exceeding the envelope of what they've experienced that it's entering into special case territory.
Rather my point was that people, including myself, have a tendency to believe they're in an exceptional case when they're actually not. And thus will see discussions on sites like this and assume that's what they need to do. And of course they don't understand the tradeoffs and wind up not realizing they're actually making things harder for themselves.
The classic example is scaling issues where people, again including myself, assume they have exotic scaling needs simply because it's larger than anything they've seen before. When in fact by objective measures what they have is something that could run perfectly fine on 20 year old hardware and bog standard techniques.
In other words, there are people and situations where it makes sense to use something else. But most people believing they're in that category are wrong.