I've a more detailed comment below, but the issue isn't new databases per se, but the huge number of legacy systems out in the world. I have no control of those, I end up building software that has to work with them and help the users and their clients.

You deal with questionable quality data that comes from hundreds of different systems running software that may be decades old with demographics from around the world that may have no common conventions. And you fight for the extra disc space and processors to handle an extra hundred characters per record, because with a huge number of records, even that may cause issue with storage, backups and time to process.

And yes, I have to write code to deal with all of the "Little Bobby Tables", too.