No it can’t, because doing that would break live backups and replication, which both depend on capturing the WAL and assume it’s a total representation of all d

No it can’t, because doing that would break live backups and replication, which both depend on capturing the WAL and assume it’s a total representation of all data managed by the DB. Any data that isn’t written to the WAL in its entirety can’t be replicated, and can’t be guaranteed to be backed up correctly. If you’re willing to throw away that functionality, then maybe you could avoid writing the rows to the WAL completely (but it seems Postgres doesn’t support that). But personally I would always be a little suspect of data stored in Postgres that never transited the WAL. It’s a core part of how Postgres provides it durability guarantees, and lots of tools and functionality assume that everything worth protecting gets written to it at least once.