It’s been the same experience for me. Until you get into petabyte levels of data a single replicated and vertically scaled pg is probably going to be just fine. Quite a few orgs probably realized that eventually after sinking $MM into some Hadoop/Spark setup in the mid 2010’s.

If what you’re doing is

1. Easily parallelizable

2. CPU intensive

3. In 10’s of petabytes or more

Then one of these machine gun like setups makes sense in 2022. Otherwise YAGNI (you aren’t gonna need it)