After 20 years I am actually getting a bit skeptical behind the "you should constantly be learning" mantra. If you are constantly learning new, tech, you will never be an expert in anything. (That statement is very much a generalization and I am sure there are tons of people that will point out issues with it).
I've met plenty of pretty senior people believing the opposite and most of them likely aren't good liars.
When the dumbshit over engineered "cloud architecture" that was pushed on you (managers don't get promoted or switch companies for a big raise by reducing their headcount... no, they get promoted by building a big team for a successful [please don't check in on how it was doing two years later...] "cloud transformation") has all kinds of problems and the costs shoot into the stratosphere, while five servers on a rack would have granted greater uptime and performance in practice for your usage patterns, and lower costs... it's not your fault.
Have some bad luck and that simple solution you pushed for happens to experience an unlikely failure causing a significant outage in year 1, and your head's on the chopping block.
If everything will be my fault in the end, then screw it - I will go ahead and take ownership/control of all of those things and make sure they don't come back around to bite me in the ass. If someone questions my authority, I always cast it in terms of "how many weekends with your family are you willing to sacrifice to support that idea?" Oftentimes this is all it takes to get those idle suggestions put in the bin so we can move forward.
Solving database circus in a real business environment requires disengaging all of the safeties and getting very messy with your free time, stress levels and other humans. It's a front-loaded suffering though. If you actually know what you are doing and get through the schema refactor (and it sticks), everything is down-hill from that point. Getting one schema to rule them all and then having the team learn that schema == new common language by which you can communicate that did not exist prior. In our business, non-developers are just as aware of our tables, columns and relations as developers & DBAs are. In some cases, they have more detail about how a field is used than I do.
use the appropriate tools to solve the problem at hand. it depends.
only if the people who are hiring you are just as ignorant