Web Applications from the Future

Am I wrong to say that modern webapp development practices treat the DB as a dumb source? They might as well just read/write the data from a text file.

I prefer to treat the DB as an API. Interactions take place with via stored procedures.

There are times I feel this all could be done with just a bunch of text files (database tables) and scripts (awk/sed ... maybe even use grep) to read/write from them. CGI-BIN days :)