I wonder why Singlestore has been so unpopular (at least I never hear about it). Quick guess is that HTAP itself isn’t a significant feature requirement, maybe just a cherry on top of other major db features.
In addition to the AI use cases, sometimes you wanna share the data warehouse data in oltp way for fast lookups and high concurrency. Not sure whether Neon will do that but I hope so.
One example from Snowflake is hybrid tables which adds rowstore next to columnar.
It's OK, but I noticed that my colleagues started cursing a lot more after we started using it. It's still a bit rough around the edges, and there are interesting pitfalls you just learn after failing.
We mainly use the K8sOperator, and the logic is mainly inside independent containers. Therefore our development and testing is not so tightly coupled to Python or Airflow.