Schema management and automated migration generation frameworks alleviate a lot of that headache. As long as the schema definitions are well structured and can be easily analyzed against a live db to find diffs and generate migration scripts. Django does this very well. You don't even need to use Django for the application, you can use it purely to define schemas and perform migrations on the DB. I'm sure there are alternatives for other languages.

People who got tired of dealing with schemas are now realizing that having zero schema is way more of a headache and way more work than the up front work of creating the schema.