It was. Now compare the benchmark of OLTP tasks and you will be surprised

It does. And that’s why I am afraid of that. Operational costs are important as well. I’d rather have those components individually than integrated into a whole ecosystem. This way I can more easily replace components, which is going to be necessary at some point.

Smear campaign with an open source product? Are you sure you still have a working organ between your ears?

That being said, my recommendation is based on using databases in big data environments for 15 years. But I am glad that your home lab is working fine with MariaDB. Does not mean it is a good product. And your comment just proves my point.

While there was a time, where those databases were considered “good”, they are only this famous because they have been free or open source for ages. Professors love open source stuff. This does not necessarily mean it is a good product in terms of database functionality. They have been stuck in the old age and simply get outperformed by almost anything. Professors also hate to change their slides and to learn something new. Because their priority is on functionality, not on real world use. And when you want to use a product in the real world, non-functional properties gain a lot of value. One of them is performance.

If you want to have a fast, reliable, open source database, use ClickHouse.

Avoid MySQL and MariaDB at all cost.