And then there is Mannheim, a city with no street names. This was originally a planned city where the city center has rectangular blocks numbered in a letter-number scheme. So there is e.g. a block L5. This refers to one side of the 4 adjacent streets. The other side of these streets is addreseed with L3, L5, etc... what his means is that you have addresss like O7 6 - a single letter and two numbers in a row. I bet that a lot if input validators for addresses trip over something like that.
I had to rediscover the "INSERT only, no UPDATEs" trick on my own. Changed from separate truth and historical tables to a single table which is groomed over time. Major simplification. A few extra benefits: like scaling, testing and auditing.
And my peers absolutely lost their minds. A senior VP rolled back my architecture the moment he could. (We were acquihired, so this meant major upheaval of systems which had be in use for over 3 years.) My solution was just too weird looking, too unorthodox.
So while there's lots of things we can do to mitigate databasization and buy ourselves some head room, we don't.
Square peg, round hole?
My radical (unoriginal) thought is the problem is the people, not the tools.
Real world is messy, evolving. Schemas and programming languages encourage rigidity, but can be more flexible. So while we can design and use adaptable systems, we don't.
An additional theory I have is that the people drawn to our type of work have rigid views and strive to make the world more ordered, through their systems, rather than accommodate the chaos. Aspirationally. Not in truth. Because I regard most of our efforts to be rather chaotic.
Fowler's Event Sourcing [2005] https://martinfowler.com/eaaDev/EventSourcing.html
Published after I stumbled onto my solution.
For the applications that I designed so far, that meant that I always made room for intentional loopholes like free-form comments or ways to override hardcoded processes. It is not 100% perfect and foolproof, but it made using these applications a lot less painful in practice.
A wholesale return to paper is like trying to put the genie back into the bottle. It is really about how rigid a process can become without becoming a barrier or burden.