“Use Postgres for everything” is a great philosophy at low/medium scale to keep things simple, but there comes a scaling point where I want my SQL database doing as little possible.
It’s basically always the bottleneck/problem source in a lot of systems.
Yes. For example you'll typically have a "budget" of 1-10k writes/sec. And a single heavy join can essentially take you offline. Even relatively modest enterprises typically need to shift some query patterns to OLAP/nosql/redis/etc. before very long.
Of course. The flip side is that many, many more people are in the "low/medium scale" zone than would self report. Everyone thinks they're a scale outlier because people tend to think in relative terms based on their experience. Just because something is larger scale than one is used to, doesn't mean it's high scale.