That's not been my experience. I write applications with in Go using a SQLite backend and it's not uncommon to see writes transactions that are in the 100s of microseconds. I typically see read transactions with multiple queries around ~50µs. That's all running on very modest $5/month DigitalOcean droplets. The vast majority of web applications do not see thousands of requests per second so I think SQLite is a great fit for most web apps.