Teams outside Infra aren't allowed persistent disk. Service authors get to pick from a small catalog of managed operational storage systems. Life would be a lot easier if a scalable Postgres were one of them, but it isn't. For the moment, the offerings with high scalability and good SLAs are all KV stores.

We do have ES but it's operated for log search, not production critical paths.

Too much time and not enough things to do.

How does this happen?! They're so expensive

Give me twenty billion dollars to make a ride hailing app and I'll show you.

More seriously: they raised tens of billions of dollars to make a ride hailing app and research self-driving cars. Throwing more money at a problem doesn't solve it faster, but it does pay for hiring people, and headcount is seen as a proxy for doing stuff.

When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Some big start-ups[0] solve this conundrum by investing in adjacent companies to find the solutions they're paid to find. Outsourcing! This still has limits because there's so much money flowing around right now. Tossing a few million at a company with hundreds still won't solve the problem faster.

[0] Start-up definition for this post: a company that has taken funding but hasn't yet found a sustainable business model. That's how Uber is still a start-up with more money than most companies make in decades.