I see this in my home kitchen and it has come to drive me batty. I think it's related to general innumeracy. Maybe the fear of numbering thing.
In the kitchen I've seen people saving butter wrappers to use the little scraps of butter on them to grease up pots and pans for cooking. That couldn't be a tenth of a cents worth of butter. Same with sauces and leaving only the last little table spoon in them. Why not use it all up and get a new one? I think it's also an inherited behavior back from Depression era days. Shrug.
Personally I stopped working 10 years ago and have plenty of financial resources, but I still take the train or bus as much as possible, or if I must drive, walk a block to avoid paying for parking. It has nothing to do with money and everything to do with living the values that I care about and trying to communicate those to our kids.
The only depression-era thing that I can think of passed on through my family and those I know is inherently selfish mechanism of survival because of scarcity. Things like always pay yourself first, and take what you can get when you can get it.
Isn't Airtable similar to what you're describing (though it isn't as powerful)?
Or do you have something else in mind?
Access was a full relational database and drag-and-drop UI builder (with generated forms and views as well) that could drop down to SQL in a pinch.
I too would absolutely love a web-based Access equivalent.
A "couple days of work" could be 3 to 5, U.S. minimum wage is $7.25 an hour, and if you work 8 hours a day that is $174 to $290.
A real wage for a developer in the U.S. is probably 10x that. A company I worked for charged $2000-$3000 for a simple interactive web site, probably more like $20,000 for a serious application with a fair number of screens.
I rarely do "free trials" of products, particularly when I am working for somebody else. Giving a product a fair evaluation could be week or more of work, which won't pay off unless I buy the product. If I am working for someone else I have to not only convince myself but may also need to convince my boss, convince my boss's boss, ...
Similiarly I see all kinds of hand-wringing from people who are afraid that they are going to exceed the free tier on AWS and get a bill for $2.
I am a big fan of low code, I think the world still needs a web-based version of the old Microsoft Access. Why that doesn't exist is beyond me, but I will say (1) Firebase isn't it, and (2) whenever somebody does make one they seem to quickly get bought and shut down.