The TI-99/8 looks like it would have been awesome. It solved the issues of the 99/4a, had improved basic and pascal built in, all while being backward compatible.
I currently have hopes / am watching Apostrophy who are building on top of Graphene but at least they acknowledge that people need Google Play and are attempting to support that while not sacrificing the entire device to privacy issues. https://www.apostrophy.ch
It is interesting to watch them try to grow so quickly. At some point they'll need to turn more profit to hold all this scale up. We'll see if they can stick to the privacy claims or start to sell out.
Unless your project is small and for learning, or won't be around for very long, Yes. You absolutely do or will end up in a technical debt world of hurt. I have worked on systems without them that are 15+ years old and the vast, vast majority of fixes and refactoring were self inflicted wounds like this. We added FK's and indexes where necessary and wound up faster and safer.
My pain threshold was crossed this past week when Edge added a Bing search bar to the middle of the Windows desktop. Even though the default search bar 4 inches away already searches Bing, and the Weather applet by the clock now has sensationalist news forced into it.
Some people are stuck due to driver support. As streaming has been growing, ElGato has zero official support for Linux. I solved this by relegating Windows to a tiny 1 liter PC after enough Windows anti-patterns.
I'm surprised that WCCF tech is getting on the HN front page. They are known for just running with any inkling of a rumor, or even just jumping to their own wild conclusions and running articles on that.
Sally Foxton-Ward (EETimes) and Ian Cuttress (TechTechPotato) started a podcast (only 2 episodes so far I think) listing through companies and what they do. I agree it is very hard to follow with companies coming and going.