Ironically you need a bit of both. You need to be expert enough to make it work, but not "too" expert to be stuck in your ways and/or influenced by all the fear-mongering.
An expert will give you thousands of theoretical reasons why self-hosting the DB is a bad idea.
An "expert" will host it, enjoy the cost savings and deal with the once-a-year occurrence of the theoretical risk (if it ever occurs).
"just use postgres from your distro" is *wildly* underselling the amount of work that it takes to go from apt install postgres to having a production ready setup (backups, replica, pooling, etc). Granted, if it's a tiny database just pg-dumping might be enough, but for many that isn't going to be enough.
If you're a 'startup', you'll never need any of that work until you make it big. 99% of startups do not make it even medium size.
If you're a small business, you almost never need replicas or pooling. Postgres is insanely capable on modern hardware, and is probably the fastest part of your application if your application is written in a slower dynamic language like Python.
I once worked with a company that scaled up to 30M revenue annually, and never once needed more than a single dedicated server for postgres.
I don't think any of these would take more than a week to setup. Assuming you create a nice runbook with every step it would not be horrible to maintain as well. Barman for backups and unless you need multi-master you can use the builtin publication and subscription. Though with scale things can complicated really fast but most of the time you won't that much traffic to have something complicated.
it's easy to through names out like this (pgbackrest is also useful...) but getting them setup properly in a production environment is not at all straightforward, which I think is the point.
…in which case, you should probably use a hosted offering that takes care of those things for you. RDS Aurora (Serverless or not), Neon, and many other services offer those properties without any additional setup. They charge a premium for them, however.
It’s not like Mongo gives you those properties for free either. Replication/clustering related data loss is still incredibly common precisely because mongo makes it seem like all that stuff is handled automatically at setup when in reality it requires plenty of manual tuning or extra software in order to provide the guarantees everyone thinks it does.
