> IMO Maria has fallen behind MySQL. I wouldn't chose it for anything my income depends on.
Can you give any details on that?
I switched to MariaDB back in the day for my personal projects because (so far as I could tell) it was being updated more regularly, and it was more fully open source. (I don't recall offhand at this point whether MySQL switched to a fully paid model, or just less-open.)
SKIP LOCKED was added in 10.6 (~2021), years after MySQL had it (~2017). My company was using MariaDB around the time and was trailing a version or two and it made implementing a queue very painful.
One area where Maria lags significantly is JSON support. In MariaDB, JSON is just an alias for LONGTEXT plus validation: https://mariadb.com/docs/server/reference/data-types/string-...
IME MariaDB doesn't recover or run as reliably as modern versions of MySQL, at least with InnoDB.