Are people still trying to shoehorn sqlite to run in a server-side context? I thought that was a fad that everyone gave up on.
No, it's still pretty cool, easy to use with low operational complexity in low volume read-mostly projects: CMSs, blogs, ecommerce platforms.
People are building DBMSes and, instead of writing the engine from scratch, are choosing an off-the-shelf solution that integrates into a DBMS with ease.
A better question to ask is why the world needs yet another DBMS, but the reasons are no doubt valid.
I am a heavy skeptic of this thing, but I can see a good use case for it: S3 I/O, ephemeral compute (1 instance), versioned blobs. The first two allow you to abstract the data away from the compute (flexibility), and the third lets you recover from mistakes or bugs quicker (or do immutable migrations easier).
I think the devil's in the details though. I expect a high number of unusual bugs due to the novel code, networking, and multiple abstractions. I'd need to trial it for a year before I called it reliable.
I am. Super simple. Super cheap. Great dev experience. Want to know whether the migration is going to work? Just download the prod db locally and test it. I'm happy.
For things like config management I feel like it makes all the sense in the world. Whomever the primary is can soak some infrequent-ish write-load. Then the whole DB can quickly copy to where it's needed, or, in lite stream VFS 's case, even less needs to be shipped.
Nope, still going strong.
I use Litestream for near real-time backups. Does not change how SQLite is used on the server, just a replacement for .backup