It's basically like saying you're ok with dangling pointers or orphaned records, or that you're awesome enough not to need these "slow", annoying safety feature

It's basically like saying you're ok with dangling pointers or orphaned records, or that you're awesome enough not to need these "slow", annoying safety features. That's all fine, but we know how this ends up in reality. Checking that child records that can exist only if there is a parent record are deleted when the parent is deleted and that the foreign key you're using in a record actually exists in the pointed-to table, for the price of a single index you very likely need anyway, is hardly a problem. You don't need to cascade deletes or anything, that's a red herring, as is migration issues where you can turn off referential integrity while the process is performed.