> With Postgres, we mostly just use `text` everywhere, unless there is an actual reason to have a size limit.

Yeah, there's still the very rare need to performance engineer out a fixed char field "to the left" of the table to speed up common table scans, but also so many of the reasons you might table scan strings have moved into proper full text search indexes or now all the rage is in vector embeddings.

> In other news, I haven't seen a dedicated "DBA" at a company in over a decade.

Yeah, anecdotally from LinkedIn and other sources it does seem like all the dedicated DBAs that have stayed that way have stuck to very specific niches and/or Oracle Products (including MySQL and derivatives these days; the "Oracle Effect" is strong). Especially in Amazon RDS and Azure SQL Server/Cosmos DB today, Postgres and Microsoft's SQL Server mostly run themselves and day-to-day administration is minor/trivial.