alt Hacker NewsMy experience just differs from you so much. Two of my employers extensively use serializable isolation and the code to handle retries is automatic. It helps that there are other reasons for retrying the transaction, like load shedding. The only bug I’ve observed is when a colleague forgot that the transaction could retry and the code wrote some logs to disk multiple times; it wasn’t even a correctness bug just a performance bug.
I'd say I had worse problems than many due to mixing long and short transactions on the same db. Which is something you need to avoid anyway if possible. The main webapp I dealt with also handled retries automatically, so we could do schema migrations live (with carefully crafted DML and other backend systems shutdown). I think we kept the webapp read committed (PostgreSQL backend), because that system didn't need the consistency guarantees.
Personally, I don't think databases or database libraries should specify a default isolation level at all, and that it needs to be explicitly specified. But legacy code and backwards compatibility and new user experience and all that. I think most of the issues I pointed out come down to needing to be aware of the consequences of your choices, or not even being aware that a choice has been made that can be very hard to change retroactively.