In my example the abuse was on the OOP part, not in the relational database part. Database joins were fine, they just weren’t being made in the database itself

In my example the abuse was on the OOP part, not in the relational database part. Database joins were fine, they just weren’t being made in the database itself, due to absurd amounts of abstraction. I don’t disagree that rethinking the problem with NoSql would solve it (or maybe even would have prevented it), but on the other hand I bet having 5 layers of OOP could also mess up a perfect NoSql design.