Certainly don’t disagree, I’m well acquainted with the limits of the query planner. Especially when dealing with high complexity queries. My broader point is t

Certainly don’t disagree, I’m well acquainted with the limits of the query planner. Especially when dealing with high complexity queries. My broader point is that CTEs in Postgres are more nuanced than they appear at first blush. They’re frequently presented as simply a method of writing cleaner, more readable SQL. The fact that CTEs receive special treatment by the planner is often missed, along with the fact that two functionally identical queries, one using sub-queries, the other CTEs, can have wildly different performance characteristics.