And even more people talk about high scale workloads with no clue what they actually look like. :)

I routinely work with 10TB+ PostgreSQL clusters, 10TB+ BigTable clusters and 500TB+ BigQuery projects all in my current day job. I'm in Data Infra btw so this is sort of my bread and butter.

In the past I have worked with 100TB+ Cassandra clusters, 50TB+ MySQL+Vitess and countless other stores like MongoDB, RethinkDB, Voldemort, TokyoCabinet and probably tons I have forgotten.

It's highly unlikely one actually works with and manipulates these volumes of data on a regular basis and doesn't respect SQL stores and the JVM (the literal king of Big Data).