You can also absolutely run Postgres on your vps, the setup is slightly more complicated than sqlite, but it's a matter of 15 minutes vs 5 minutes.

When you say "baremetal servers in-house", are you talking about colocation in a european cloud provider like Hetzner, or are you talking about actually self hosting at home in your garage like some hobbyist do ?

If you're talking about self hosting in your garage, I wonder how you handle networking, I mean, even if you have a good optic fiber with 1 or 10gbps, if you start getting real significant traffic, wouldn't you end up getting emails from your provider asking you why you are using 10000x more bandwith than your neighbors, and eventually be cut off ?

I worked for ByteDance in Singapore. People would show up for work between 10 and 11am, lunch would start around 11:45am or 12, then people would nap until 2pm at their desk. A good, focused engineer could produce the same output as these engineers while only working in the morning

Exactly - I felt like the real work happened only 11-12 and 15-18, and maaaybe some meetings 19-20. Everything else was a fluff.

How about graying out the button, but adding a tooltip on hover that tells the user why they can't click

Are you capable of achieving no downtime deployment ? I mean, on the product I currently work on, we have one mongo database, and a cluster of 4 pods on which our backend is deployed. When we want to deploy some new feature without having any downtime, one of the pod is be shut down, our product still work with the 3 remaining pods, and we start a new pod with the new code, and do this for the 4 pods. But with SQLite, if I understand correctly, you have one machine or one VM, that is both running your backend, and storing your SQLite.db file. If you want to deploy some new features on your backend, can you achieve no downtime deployment ?