I agree! I still sometimes use LibreOffice Base for quick prototyping [0] or Microsoft Access if I am on Windows. It uses HSQLDB by default but you can connect to several external JDBC, ODBC and ADO compatible databases, though I often use DBeaver for that purpose. [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice_Base

[1] https://dbeaver.io/