[twblalock]

The real reason NoSQL took off was ease of onboarding for writing MVP applications really quickly at startups. No need to come up with a detailed and performant table structure in advance -- and that's a good thing because your schemas are going to change every week! The languages you use in your stack are probably not typesafe anyway! Just extend the REST API all the way to the database and stick your JSON in it.

There are two main reasons it continues to thrive: most developers who entered the industry since ~2010 have not used anything else, and the traditional SQL databases are painful to set up in multi-region cloud topologies without a dedicated DBA team.