It is sad that the law was enacted in the first place (lobbying by 'the usual suspects') and others had to fight to repeal what is violating common law, common sense and natural justice.
A few years ago AWS used to be quite generous with SES. As a result it became the source of a lot of spam. Thankfully they started becoming strict since the last 2 years. This along with new features like managed warmup, multi-region sending, has made AWS SES very desirable.
CSV works because CSV is understood by non technical people who have to deal with some amount of technicality. CSV is the friendship bridge that prevents technical and non technical people from going to war.
I can tell an MBA guy to upload a CSV file and i'll take care of it. Imagine i tell him i need everything in a PARQUET file!!! I'm no longer a team player.
I can't help but recommend an accounting software called Manager (https://www.manager.io/). You install it on your computer and its free. It's probably the most beautifully designed accounting software i have come across. They also have a cloud version.
I first came across Manager about 5 years ago and wanted my accountants to use it. However they chose Xero because they were 'used to Xero'.
I still have Manager installed and play around with it whenever i need inspiration.
The downloadable version is single user. All data is stored in an SQLITE file which you can just copy-paste if you have to move computers. You can decide where you want to store the SQLITE file. I ended up choosing a shared dropbox folder. Guess what, now i have a multi-user version. Although, i'm not sure if the Manager team would recommend this approach.
I have the same question. I have a small DB on Planetscale and happily pay 39 for it. IMO, Vector DB's are the next frontier. I can understand the tough decision for Planetscale, given that the cloud services can just offer it as a service and corner all value of an open source project.