I'm not advocating for perfectly normalized schemas. There's a large gap from: perfectly normalized schema -> unstructured blob of json. I'm saying that most people nowadays prefer to not think at all about how their data looks and they'll add properties ad-hoc.

This also does not hold up well in an operations heavy environment. Like all things in programming, a well balanced approach is necessary. Some combination of formally structured data with some flexibility for future requirements is probably the best course of action here, but that's too much work for programmers these days.