> since neither IBM nor Oracle is a service that any self-respecting person not part of an enterprise sales cycle would actually use

Heh, snarky.

I guess (almost) everyone uses PgBouncer because they want to use a setup that will need the scaling needs of most users from the get-go, to avoid wasting support time.

Personally, I run without it due to a fairly small scale - I don't need more than about 128-256 connections max and for me a dedicated connection pooler (other than what's sometimes used app-side) would just add complexity.

At the same time, one could totally reasonably make the argument that if almost everyone uses it, then it SHOULD quite possibly be a built in feature, instead of a separate component - such a tighter integration would most likely bring the overall complexity down.