[doctor_eval]

Yes, agreed. I spent a few years away from the technical side of things and when I jumped back in I was horrified at the amount of complexity these things added.

In Java it appeared that JPA was trying to completely abstract the database into the JVM, but it just meant a million annoying cache problems, terrible performance, a serious cognitive load, and poor interoperability with other database users.

The guy who promoted this internally kind of wrote the problems off as being a "leaky abstraction" but it wasn't even that. JPA entirely failed to resolve the object-relational "impedance mismatch" by failing to acknowledge that the boundary between the database and the application is actually a legitimate surface, like any other API surface.

What a nightmare it was.