In my group, the person who helped the vendor set up our new DB has convinced management to convert all of our metadata tables (which we use for every filter operation) to JSON. As you can guess, he's never benchmarked a DB in his life.
Since our visualization tool went from 2 seconds per click (when I set it up the original DB) to over 40 now, even before implementing this change, I'm watching in amazement, waiting for someone to complain. It's truly incredible how tolerant users are. It's one of the reasons I think AI will take our jobs much sooner than most think: the average user has no useful perspective on silly things like performance or determinism, "that's just how it is".
They do hate it; they have been taught that no matter the complaints, the bad experience will never change, so why waste time complaining.
> I'm watching in amazement, waiting for someone to complain
Sometimes you have to be the change you want to see in the world.
(the other possibility is that much fewer people are looking at this data than you'd expect ...)
Whenever I call some client support service to complain about their website being broken, incorrect, malfunctioning, or something similar, and I explicitly ask them to notify their IT system about it, I feel like some weird alien or raging boomer asking for something impossible. They don't even understand it, and my complaints just become useless. There are no more e-mails to contact, nothing that can be done to improve the situation. It's enshittification all the way down, and too bad for those of us who had known a better state of affairs, we just have to become blind to it.