Fine grained control over locks, transaction levels, JSON indexing, etc. In fact, some databases (older versions of Postgres, Oracle, etc.) do not actually have

Fine grained control over locks, transaction levels, JSON indexing, etc. In fact, some databases (older versions of Postgres, Oracle, etc.) do not actually have true serializability so explicit locks may be the only way to implement certain logic correctly. I picked on explicit locks since it is quite useful as well as being generally poorly supported by ORMs.