[lunar_mycroft]

First, you're very likely underestimating how much load SQLite can handle. SQLite is usually write limited, but for smallish writes it can easily handle thousands a second with very trivial optimization, and with more thought can scale to tens or hundreds of thousands of write transactions per second. In some cases, it can actually out perform traditional server based RDMSs because of reduced overhead and because holding locks on network timescales (which will likely happen even for databases with multiple writers, because eventually you have to deal with two transactions needing to write to the same place) is very inefficient.

Second, I think you're overestimating how hard sharding is here. There are plenty of use cases for which sharding isn't just easy to set up, but the natural thing you'd be likely to do even without scale. Things like e.g. a helpdesk SaaS, where each customer/organization has it's own independent data.

Third, a large part of the point is that you are unlikely to know ahead of time you're going to "scale like that". As I already pointed out, most SaaS apps do not end up having many users. For some that's intentional, but for others the reason is that they simply never caught on. For those cases (and they're the vast majority), cosplaying as a much larger app is a complete waste. It's much better to wait until you're successful enough to need to switch and then use the revenue you now have to solve the scaling problem you ran into.

Fourth, as an aside, ironically the other (slightly less) easy way to shard superficially resembles a common way people cosplay as netflix: splitting your data by domain as "microservices" (although there's a good chance they don't need to be independent processes/on independent machines).

[switchbak]

I don't care that much about performance - I imagine any modern machine can handle that load pretty well, for this context that's not a huge concern.

The concerns are more about distributed systems issues, maintenance, etc. Typical NIH issues. Which you're embracing when you start building your own systems (ie: with sharding).

This is a solved problem, why would I want to inject these burdens onto myself, instead of solving ... actual problems that I already have enough of! I don't want to be building another Temporal/Cadence/DBOS/etc.