It changed a while back. Definitely surprised me in a bad way in the last year or two and I went through something similar to the OP. That said, I stuck the env

It changed a while back. Definitely surprised me in a bad way in the last year or two and I went through something similar to the OP. That said, I stuck the env variable in my shell setup and I would point out brew does include tooling to upgrade databases from one major version of Postgres to the next so you can get back and running (unless you have cause to stick with a certain version to match server setup, which is a bit of a pain).