[dkarl]

> in my experience it’s kind of a sign of lazy design

Is it always lazy in the bad way, though? In software there's no sharp distinction between "built to carry weight" and "built to tack drywall onto." Whether a system is robust or dangerously unscalable depends on the context. You can always do the thought experiment, "What if our sales team doubled in size and then sold and onboarded customers as fast as they could until we had 100% of the market," and maybe using your database as a message queue is fine for that.

If it results in a sad dev team, then that's a case where it was a mistake. It's hard to maintain, or it's an operational nightmare. That isn't the inevitable result of using a (software) decorative stud as a (software) load-bearing element, though. There are a lot of systems happily and invisibly doing jobs they weren't designed for, saving months of work building a "proper" solution.