[baronvonsp]

The exact analogy that came to mind for me.

Plus, relational databases don't just sit under a single application. There's usually multiple applications/services talking to them. Worse, humans connect to them an do all sorts of things they shouldn't do. That's the whole point of managing referential integrity in the DBMS, since you can only control "just write good code" across so many application domains.

Of course whether the performance tradeoff is worth it is a complicated decision for many of the reasons people have mentioned. But in 20 years of working with relational databases at big companies, I've seen few examples where the performance win exceeded the business risk.