It's way more powerful than that, since every active user session can have its own shaped & subsetted subscription to live data. See https://electric-sql.com/demos/proxy-auth for an example of how you could build a simple authorization proxy that allows each client session to build a customized long-poll of their own subset of relevant data, directly connecting to the Electric engine, and https://electric-sql.com/demos/react for how simple the frontend code can be.

I fondly remember the days of Meteor (before the pivot to Apollo), where you'd give up SQL and in return be able to give every user a real-time live-updating data model, kept in sync with a secure subset of the central MongoDB database. Now, you don't need to give up the SQL part, nor are you locked into an entire ecosystem. We're going to see really cool things built on this.

It's closer to Firebase on Postgres, in my opinion.