[lathiat]

This context is key here. High concurrency workloads have not suffered this badly and in most cases have increased performance and that's specifically part of why. For many (or possibly even a good majority) of users, that's more important than low-concurrency.

Those blindly suggesting MariaDB or Percona is all well and good but naive. Percona generally follows MySQL upstream but makes their own little tweaks which could be (but are not always) fixed in MySQL upstream based on differing specific priorities.

MariaDB is highly diverged at this point and likely has a whole different set of problems and benefits.

Author of these posts is well known for a long (10+ years) history of working with MySQL at a deep level rivalling that of many of the developers, generally writes good stuff (though is not infallible :)