"The team removed table joins and complex queries from the database layer."

As a database person, I dislike reading this. I understand their need and priority to keep things running. But I would have loved it if they emphasized that doing something like this has so many disadvantages.

Normalization, referential integrity and a powerful query language bring so many benefits. I see young people oftentimes seeing relational vs. NoSQL as two totally valid opinions, like Coke vs. Pepsi. And not as one thing runs the world for decades and is perfect for >90% of use cases, and the other one is for niche cases and fast hyper-scalers.