I've never seen it as that much of a leap. At least half of my work on web applications in my career, especially earlier before SPA's were so popular, revolved

I've never seen it as that much of a leap. At least half of my work on web applications in my career, especially earlier before SPA's were so popular, revolved around finely tuning the database. In the later parts of my career, it still does because it seems like fewer people want to "deal" with the database internals. IMO pivoting fully into DB development would be a very natural path, for me at least.