I mostly agree but I had plenty of cases where the project / team was forced to reinvent a query engine over flat files and/or in-memory caches.

From that POV I moved from the extreme of "you don't need a state at all (and hence no database)" to the bit more moderate "you usually don't need a file or a DB but you almost certainly will want to query whatever state you store so just get a DB early".

I strongly sympathize with "no microservices" of course. That's an overkill for at least 99% of all projects I've ever seen (was a contractor for a long time). But state + querying is an emergent property as a lot of projects move beyond the prototype phase.