I worked mostly in closed source RDBMS so I do not have so much experience in those open ecosystems, my question is why MariaDB still a thing in a world with Postgres or MySQL?
Also MySQL makes some different tradeoffs than other databases, and while some of those may eat your data they can also make MySQL the best choice in some situations.
MariaDB is an attempt at a better, freer, faster fork of MySQL, viable as a drop-in replacement. That comes with all the expected drama around the MySQL/MariaDB choice and the companies behind them.