If you've ever had to work with nontrivial procs in MySQL/MariaDB, it's immediately clear how the status quo is deficient there, and why e.g. Postgres's multi-language support is so much better in comparison.
And how is it "minutiae" to be able to figure out "is my database version actually supported"? This is the fourth versioning scheme they've used in less than a decade, that's a bit nuts I think.
I would happily write stored procs using the current language support for a decade without pay, before I'd subject myself to putting javascript in a fucking database engine.
> And how is it "minutiae" to be able to figure out "is my database version actually supported"?
Remembering "8.4", "9.7" and ".4" just doesn't seem like a particularly big deal to me. The number* has only changed 3 times in the last 10 years.
I don't like JS either, but lots of people do. And if you're expanding a DB beyond SQL-only, JS is an obvious first choice before adding further languages from there. (The MySQL feature is called "Multilingual Engine Component" and not "JavaScript Engine Component".)
As for the versioning, it's a nightmare for third party vendors like me, because it will absolutely increase the number of companies who are unintentionally running unsupported non-LTS "innovation" releases because they can't keep all these versioning changes straight. The major-version only changed 3 times in the past decade because 8.0 was "evergreen" for most of that time, which was also not a good strategy, yet the most obvious solution (SemVer) is always ignored by Oracle in favor of more confusing alternatives.