The criticism of mongodb that I'm referring to is from the early days when there were some questionable defaults (e.g. writes not being required to be fully wri

The criticism of mongodb that I'm referring to is from the early days when there were some questionable defaults (e.g. writes not being required to be fully written to the database before returning success to the user, which can lead to data loss if something happens that prevents the write from completing afterwards). I agree that's a separate concern than not having the schema enforced by the database. It's possible that my experience is skewed by being more involved when I worked there, but I used to hear and see a lot more criticism of mongodb around things like data durability and ACID compliance than about the lack of an enforced schema. Maybe things have moved on enough that this isn't a common complaint anymore, which would be a pleasant surprise, and hopefully we can get to that point on PHP too.