[globular-toast]

It's not really about being able to swap out the db or something, that's just a bonus. It's about being able to write a proper domain model (ie. entities and business rules etc.) that is clear and testable and independent of details like persistence, serialisation, i/o protocols etc. If your system is just CRUD, then you absolutely don't need anything like this, but if you have business rules (high level stuff) and intermingle it with low level details then it quickly becomes a mess that is hard to reason with.

But you should totally do what you're doing until it breaks. You only start looking into better architecture when things are not working. Being aware of something like this means you'll have something to look up if/when you run into the problems that inevitably crop up in simple "db wrapper" type APIs.