As you can see leaking through in a few of the examples, the scenarios where it matters are the ones where non-experts are reading to and writing from the database. If a data entry clerk is just typing values into a form thinly wrapping an INSERT, you'd better make sure any input that would break implicit assumptions is rejected. If you have a legion of Bobs from marketing who "know some SQL", you can't hand-optimize every single query they try to run.
When the database is just serving a webapp you control end to end, the only part that'll really have a huge impact is making sure you can partition by the primary key effectively. Which is good, because complex indexing schemes and foreign key constraints actually scale very badly.