Possibly relevant are these 2 great papers co-authored by Michael Stonebraker[1]:
“One Size Fits All”: An Idea Whose Time Has Come and Gone[2]
The End of an Architectural Era (It’s Time for a Complete Rewrite)[3]
They basically show that classical RDBMs are inefficient by around a factor of at least 10 in every conceivable application. I tend to trade in a little of that for the kinds of dramatically simpler mechanisms discussed in TFA.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stonebraker
[2] https://cs.brown.edu/~ugur/fits_all.pdf
[3] http://cs-www.cs.yale.edu/homes/dna/papers/vldb07hstore.pdf