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Instead of trying to hack column like features and performance onto a row oriented structure, why not just develop a column storage for hypertables? All this work seems like a dead end performance-wise.

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The article covers this in more depth, but the short answer is: The hybrid approach has benefits when your workload has both shallow-and-wide (fetch all data for user X) and deep-and-narrow queries (calculate the average number of logins for all users). Row stores excel on shallow queries, column stores excel on deep queries. For time-series data you want row-oriented structures when the data just comes in and convert it to a column store after it ages.

It's also the case that, at least for Postgres, building a new low-level storage format isn't feasible until PG13.

And also this approach allows us to leverage alot of the battle-tested stability built into current storage layout with TOASTed pages, without starting from scratch.

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