[rietta]

Yes. I prefer PostgreSQL but more than a few clients who were already built on MySQL are still using it or MariaDB. As for managed provider, typically AWS RDS, or a few are still directly hosted. MariaDB is easy to run natively for a small to medium site on a VPS.

Biggest pain points are pretty much transactions around schema changes (Ruby on Rails context) meaning is possible to trash a database with changes that go wrong. Also implementing full text search is always a bit harder than it is with PostgreSQL. The capability is there but end up having to do custom queries.