> once upon a time. RDBMS features were critical in getting performance and scale once upon a time. Sharding, access control, authentication, indexed views, fk relationships and other constraint enforcement, cascading updates and deletes...

Do you think of better ways to handle this nowadays? Is it more effective/maintainable to do this in the app layer?

I think it depends on the situation. In many cases these can be handled at the app level, in particular relationships. If you use any kind of ORM, most of your queries will be on primary keys so there is less need for other indexes. Views are perhaps replaced by pre-processing data pipelines to some extent. I haven't seen database-level users or ACLs for a long time.

But I don't know, I don't really do this stuff anymore. At Google we certainly have storage and database systems with a lot of non-CRUD features (look at Spanner for example).