It sounds like your product was in the sweet spot where there isn’t much data complexity or evolution, and the schema is understandable and easy enough to modif

It sounds like your product was in the sweet spot where there isn’t much data complexity or evolution, and the schema is understandable and easy enough to modify over time without strictness. The product I work on has ~400 tables active at the moment, and ~800 that have ever existed in it over the last 6 years. We depend on the database schema to reduce complexity at the application level. I don’t think the complexity would be manageable at the application level if we couldn’t do this. At least not with the ~6 engineers working on it.