Another Obsidian alternative which I use every day is Anytype[1]. It's fully open source however under their own license which has some interesting terms to discourage commercial adoption. They seem to be very focused on individual use. The user experience is similar to Notion with some subtle differences, but overall very positive. The biggest plus for me was offline p2p sync and a really solid mobile app.
SQL has many problems: "from" should come first to help auto-complete; null handling is complicated; the syntax in general is weird. Compatibility is a problem (I have implemented some relational databases in Java: Hypersonic SQL, H2; compatibility with other databases is hard).
There is little innovation in the database space: there are hundreds of general-purpose programming languages, but very few "database" languages. I also tried to specify a new language, https://newsql.sourceforge.net/ many years ago. There's GraphQL, but more innovation in this area would be great.
Many developers end up writing huge SQL statements (one statement that is hundreds of lines). You wouldn't do that in a "proper" programming language; but in languages like SQL (or maybe Excel) this will happen.
Another problem is proper encapsulation. Views can be used, but often developers have access to all tables, and if you have many components this becomes a mess. Regular programming languages have module system and good encapsulation. SQL statements often don't use indexes, for one reason or the other. With regular programming languages, it is harder to end up in this position (as you have to define the API properly: encapsulation). Regular programming languages don't require "query optimizers".
SQL is used to reduce network roundtrips. Clients send SQL (or GraphQL) statements to the server, which are actually small programs. Those programs are executed on the server, and the response is sent to the client. (Stored procedures and for GraphQL persisted queries can be used - but that's often happening afterwards.) Possibly it would be better to send small programs written in a "better" language (something like Lua) to the server?
It's not just the bottom line; too much of Amazon's practices rely on treating humans as more expendible than styrofoam packing peanuts. It's a culture of control and expediency, and it's a feedback loop because the only way to rise in that culture is to be for more control and more expediency.
Workers with no legal protections or fallbacks, can be coerced to do things that are self-destructive out of fear, or they can be screwed out of benifits or protections through the same banality of evil as EULA agreements.
Management culture has some serious fucking problems. When I worked a factory job, the latest managerial fad was 'make workers mad enough to quit'. Because if they quit, they lost their vested retirement benefits. And those that came back, did so on reduced pay. Deplorable? Yes, but _perfectly legal_, or if not legal, the power imbalance was such that the company could get away with it scott free.
Crap like this goes on all the time, see an example FAQ lawyers put up: https://www.kentonslawoffice.com/workers-compensation-lawyer...
Lawyers working in worker compensation law are not likely starving for clientel, or they'd be seeking greener pastures. Hell, yellowpages.com shows 23 hits for 'worker comp lawyer' just within a ten mile radius of where I live.
Corporations are amoral profit-optimization engines, externalizing all possible costs to everyone else. Corporations are not people. Corporations do not think like people, even if they are made of people. Corporations do not care about people, especially not in any of the ways we would want someone who is our neighbor to care about us, not even to the bare minimum of polite indifference of not pooping on your doorstep.
Given a choice between the nebulous future of preventing provable harm, and the shorter term and slightly more concrete consequence of lost profits, corporations (and even government) chose profit.
If corporations were actual people, they would absolutely poop on your doorstep to save on their water bill, and then gaslight you with studies showing that poop on your doorstep is normal and healthy, not a big deal, and totally your own fault if it is.
The only way to made corporations (and government) behave in morally acceptable ways is to force them and watch their every move, and make the alternative more expensive.
[1] https://anytype.io/