Maybe it's distro specific but I'm fairly sure mysql by default installed with skip networking around 2012, and with bind-address set to localhost since then. Also the root user is only configured from local by default but I'm not sure if that was true 14 years ago.
If the defaults are more secure than your examples, it's not fair to blame the database or the defaults.
And personally I hate it when software forces security requirements on me. Maybe I don't need an admin password. It's one reason I gave up on selfhosted gitlab - there was no option to reduce password complexity for my users, and those users were only connecting from the local network. The other reason being that it spammed 100GB of logs in a month and was using 11GB of RAM before I'd even gotten around to setting up the first repo.
MySQL installed with skip-networking was very common, but as soon as you need to access it over the network (e.g. when you move from one box with MySQL and PHP to one for each) then you have to enable networking and everything falls apart.
Also, the number of times in my career that I've googled a problem and seen some forum post saying "Oh, just run chmod -R 777 /var/www/wordpress/uploads/ and it'll fix that" "Great it worked thanks!" tells me that it's the blind leading the blind out there and I'm sure there's tons of forum posts telling people how to disable authentication on their MySQL and disable iptables on their server so that their PHP app can connect to the DB without a password.
> selfhosted gitlab - there was no option to reduce password complexity for my users
Gitlab's default requirements aren't that intense, but you can make them more stringent if you want.
https://docs.gitlab.com/user/profile/user_passwords/#passwor...
I guess your goal was to allow users to have 4 character passwords, i.e. "love." which afaik you can't do.
They must have changed that or I was completely off base because I was just trying to remove special characters and drop it from 12 (I think) and I saw them close a feature request saying they didn't think they should support it. It's possible I misunderstood and the feature request was as you say
Most software matures to the point that sane defaults get set. In the early days, one could be forgiven for making MVP as the security and attack vectors were still growing. Now that attacks have matured, and new software that is released without mitigation of these mature risks is just dumb and lazy and deserve no forgiveness for being released that way.
You should use a user directory (AD) and then use single sign on (SSO) or or the like. It feels kinda stupid at first, but when you have many users and many apps the AD will make life easier and with SSO users can sign in with one click of a button.
I guess I'm confused; why would you, as an admin, want to allow your users to use less secure passwords? I get that your argument is that all traffic is local and so complex passwords are unnecessary (debatable, I would hold that a strong password policy would still be desirable for defense-in-depth, depending on the network and risk profile), but that doesn't make them undesirable.
We were in the middle of setting everything up company wise (for just two of us), didn't have the password manager yet and I was dictating the password to them. It might be a stupid use case, I agree, but not unreasonable. I didn't say strong passwords are undesirable I said forcing the admin of self hosted software to have to use strong passwords with not even a --yes-im-stupid flag is undesirable