> There are lots of purpose-built bullet proof queuing systems that are simple to setup and administer (or just use SQS).

Because in 99% of cases you don't need a purpose built solution (Even if engineers often think that) at the scale that most people operate in. Nothing is easier to setup and administer than the database you already use.

We are using Postgres as a worker queue in production for many years, with millions of items being processed at any time and it's been perfectly fine. If you have hundreds like in your example...might as well use sqlite.

There's great projects like https://github.com/NikolayS/pgque and https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/4/4/absurd-in-production/ that give you even some tooling around that.