The options for spinning up CRUD apps (ie, 95% of projects) are still quite miserable.
There’s an initial learning curve with the row level security stuff, but once you get a good grasp of it and come up with a few patterns that suit your needs it’s insanely fast to develop on. You’re trading the time it takes to build and manage an api for the time it takes to setup RLS.
Mostly that solves setting up Auth and Prisma SQL ORM to your DB, but Next.js App directory with the Prisma setup (2 files / 50 LOC) done is even smoother.