“The cult of scalability would rather we build applications that scale beyond our wildest dreams than applications that meet concrete customer and business needs.”
LISTEN, NOTIFY and FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED have shipped in Postgres since 9.5 in 2016. That is a working job queue in the database you already run, with no extra broker to page you at 3am. Teams still bolt on Kafka, RabbitMQ or SQS for workloads that would fit in one table. The vendors selling scale love that habit, and the on-call rotation pays for it.