That statement can definitely be true for many technologies, either because of a lot of hype and promises surrounding them (e.g. the history of MongoDB and how the NoSQL movement was like initially), or due to the mistaken belief that you need them from the very beginning of development even in cases when they are a good fit. I guess the first part is basically describing the Gartner hype cycle, which feels vaguely truthful: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gartner_hype_cycle Even good tech is susceptible to this, until people actually figure out what it's best used for and when.

If you're in the early stage of developing a prototype, or are working on a system for a small business, then a single RDBMS can indeed work for most use cases - even when you need to store JSON, use full-text indices or even store a reasonable amount of binary data (or even a NoSQL solution, depending on the constraints). It's the same with how you can build an entire business on a monolith written in boring tech, like .NET or Java, with whatever you want for the front end.

Eventually, you might be well served to branch out - at the point where the need for something more specialized becomes more pressing and you can actually afford the time and human resources to manage the complexity/integration effort and so on, or even hire people proficient in that particular tech in the first place. If you have an entire team just for search, then you're probably at that point. If it's just another ticket in your issue tracker for a developer or two to implement, just use the simple index approach with hopefully good enough results.

If it's a greenfield project and you're doing something very novel, all bets are probably off, though.

Okay, but like... as someone with a dissociative disorder this is scarily accurate

forget everything! Wake up one day and don't remember what you did the previous day. It's fine. Constantly run into friends you don't remember making. It's fine. Just be happy. Just be happy Just be happy Just be ha

An entire new class of databases that operate identically to existing ones with the exception of a single column type is silly, it's only getting traction because of aggressive VC-funded marketing.