[joshka]

Came here to say the same :D

But to steel man this a little. Joins can be cheap if you understand how they work and what the patterns of use are. I've worked on systems where that billions of rows to millions scenario is a thing. I recall working on a particularly nasty legacy query underpinning a report that took most of a day to finish that I managed to get down to tens of seconds just by tweaking a bunch of things to join right.