That's why I'm working hard on bringing in a tightly integrated support for SQLite in the Elixir ecosystem (via a Rust FFI bridge): because in my professional experience not many applications need something as hardcore and amazing as PostgreSQL; at least 80% of all apps I ever witnessed would be just fine with an embedded database.

I share similar experiences like yours and others in this thread, and to me all those operational concerns grow into unnecessary noise that distracts from the real problems that we are paid to solve.