We're super excited about materialize at Fishtown Analytics (the company that makes dbt). I think that the "reporting" use-case is well served by Snowflake/BigQuery/etc, but I do think that operational use-cases are left behind by batch-based transformation models.
The thing I'm most excited about in materialize is the ability to create Sinks (https://materialize.com/docs/sql/create-sink/). The combination of 1) streaming transformations over realtime source data and 2) streaming outputs into external systems feels like the way of the future IMO.
I saw a dbt-materialize plugin (https://github.com/jwills/dbt-materialize) out there in the wild. My guess is it's not ready for primetime yet, but would love to bake support for materialize into dbt when the time is right :)