Replied to the wrong person, but I'll take that bait anyway: "Ahahahaha, no".

That only works if you live a blissful "all my hosted pg instances use the exact same version" world, which I've never seen be the case for even moderately sized projects. You're going to need multiple Postgres installs if you're going to need pg_dump/pg_restore, which you probably are.

(How you solve that problem, of course, is not a one-size-fits-all, and Docker may be the answer... or it may not)

Doesn’t pg_dump/pg_restore work across versions? (So long as the CLI tools are the latest version). I guess version compatibility could be an issue in theory, but I’m yet to hit into a backwards compatibility issue with Postgres.

I wish. You'd think it'd just be able to check the db to see if there's any schema or procedure incompatibility, but it doesn't. Instead, it goes "Remote uses version X and you're using version Y, sort that out" and then it exits.

Oh, that's incredibly unhelpful!