You are looking at it from operational point of view. As a developer I care about different things: 1.Ops side is someone else problem. AWS takes care of that, so it just works. Otherwise, ops take care of that, so I also don't care. 2. MySQL is absolutely horrible from developer point of view. It works for most basic cases, but it's so primitive that anything non-trivial breaks it. Significant portion of its documentation is dedicated to listing all possible ways things are broken and what you need to watch out for. Postgres just works. You can combine 2,3 or more features and it all just works as you expected. 3. Pg has way more features. You have tons of data types, index types and extensions that cover enormous amount of usecases. Whatever you want to do, Pg can do it. Maybe some specialized db would be better for full-text search or GIS or storing json, but Pg will get you far (or will just do great). MySQL is nowhere near this extensibility. 4. Maybe it's historical, but I've seem way more corrupted Mysql cases than Pg. It is rock-solid. 5. As a result of that, I see MySQL vanishing from people minds. More and more products work with Pg only (or Pg and SQLite).

> CockroachDB and TiDB are alternatives that are massively more approachable

Maybe. CockroachDB claims Pg compatibility (though docs say nothing about extensions). TiDB has some interesting features, but MySQL compatibility scares me [2]. Neither of them has level of support from cloud providers that Postgres has.