It can be, but I've discovered that in tech it's common to assume that your employees' time costs $0, for some reason. I couldn't even begin to count the number

It can be, but I've discovered that in tech it's common to assume that your employees' time costs $0, for some reason. I couldn't even begin to count the number of times I've had to walk a manager back from deciding that we should spend a person-month of engineering time to develop an in-house solution that lets us avoid a $500/year licensing fee. I see this a lot in RDBMSes. I've used plenty of 'em, and I have nothing against projects like PostgreSQL; they're amazing, especially for the price. But computers cost money, and maintenance time costs money, and development time costs money, and I know from experience that I can squeeze a lot more performance out of the same hardware using MSSQL than I can PostgreSQL, and I'll have an easier time doing it, too. I can even point to some of the specific design and feature differences that lead to the discrepancy. It's to the point where, whenever I see an article talking about the limitations of relational databases, I automatically mentally insert a "that you can get for free" into the sentence.