There's one HUGE upside for doing it the current way: autogenerated columns. E.g. CREATE TABLE t (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, x INTEGER UNIQUE); INSERT IN

There's one HUGE upside for doing it the current way: autogenerated columns. E.g. CREATE TABLE t (id SERIAL PRIMARY KEY, x INTEGER UNIQUE); INSERT INTO t (x) VALUES (42), (43) ON CONFLICT DO NOTHING RETURNING *; This does EXACTLY the most useful thing if one of '42' or '43' conflicts.