The list of companies using MySQL as their primary database is absolutely massive. It's a sizeable chunk of the world's economy and it's not just used for CRUD workloads. InnoDB is admittedly much better at OLTP than OLAP, but OLTP encompasses a lot more than simple CRUD workloads.

> At least the MariaDB folks try to fix the problems that are passed down to them

This assertion simply does not make sense. MariaDB hard-forked its codebase from MySQL's a full decade ago. They were able to use/port some open source MySQL code through ~5.7 but that seems to have stopped in recent years with MySQL 8, probably due to its major architectural changes.

These days MySQL and MariaDB each have some nice features that the other one lacks.

With respect to what is "passed down", by whom and to whom: the creator of MySQL is literally the chief architect at MariaDB, and many other early MySQL AB engineers work at MariaDB. Meanwhile most of MySQL's poor reputation today is a lingering effect of its early versions, largely before the Oracle acquisition of Sun. In this context, I am continually confused as to why some Postgres users have a higher opinion of MariaDB than MySQL.

Edit to add: I failed to mention that I do absolutely concede that for a new application with heavy geospatial component, Postgres+PostGIS is absolutely the correct choice. InnoDB's geospatial support is comparatively much newer and less widely used.

MySQL’s spatial indexes work just fine and yield extremely low-latency queries when used correctly.

Well, the last time we tried to insert a bunch of complex polygons (hundreds of points, multiple parts, etc.) into an indexed column using several concurrent transactions, MySQL crashed.