My first experience with postgres was around 2009. Picked it out of curiosity and it ended up at the clients server doing it’s job and never bothered anyone.

I thought it was very cool doing fancy joins and reliable procedures but then came the NoSQL era and I nearly forgot about it. Then everyone started to realize that any growing database ends up with complicated relations and lots of applications do not fit non-relational data structures well. Suddenly postgres came up with the json and jsonb types. It was like a fairytale.

So when did it became cool? Around 2016/2017. Why? Good technical decisions and execution.