Backups are only advanced in the context of our Postgres being "Good" enough (maybe our built-in Posgres could be called "Barely enough" but that sounds a bit lame) :-)

I fully agree with you though, it's table stakes (unintended pun!) for any prod deployment, just as read-only followers, etc. Our biggest, most important point, is that folks should be using real dbs hosted by people who know what they're doing. The risk/reward ratio is out of whack in terms of doing it yourself.

And finally, re Hetzner and cross-DC latency, that's unfortunately a very good issue that we had to plan for in another case - specifically, a customer using Supabase (which is AWS-based). The solution was to simply use an EC2 machine in the same region. Thankfully, some db providers end up being explicit about which AWS region they run in - and obviously, using AWS RDS is also an option! It's definitely a consideration.