I realize you were just making a specific observation about one situation, but it's worth noting that being an "older" developer (which at 15+ years experience would be late 30s) in no universe means that the developer doesn't know things.

Indeed, the irony is that many shops full of junior FEDs found databases and stored procs so intimidating that we saw the rise of things like MongoDB. Even if it completely sabotages any medium or long term plan, if all you know is JavaScript and have very naive notions about the uses of data, seems great.