I know posts with ThOuGhT LeaDeRshIp titles like this are usually annoying, but I thought it would be interesting to write down some of the lessons I've been gathering as I've spent more time covering and using specific databases. My background is in data science / analytics with a couple of years of more traditional full stack here and there.
Broadly we've seen this pattern with infrastructure in general – it's a lot easier to set up a server than it used to be, all things considered. Now obviously if you're a tiny startup, you're more comfortable outsourcing everything to Heroku, and if you're a hyperscale enterprise, you probably want more control on exactly what your database is doing.
The thesis here is that on the tail end (hyper scale), things are getting more under control and predictable, and developers there want the same "nice things" you get with platforms like Heroku. Elsewhere in the ecosystem, more and more parts of the stack are getting turned into "simple APIs" (Stripe for payments, Twilio for comms, etc.). And perhaps most interestingly, as serverless for compute seems kind of stuck (maybe?), it may be the case that serverless for databases – whatever that ends up meaning – is actually an easier paradigm for application developers to work with.