In the uhh, postmodern world where we are too chicken to even run things like Postgres or Mongo on servers ourselves, and rely on "X as a service" I think people are looking at the marketing from the provider (in this case Railway) and just scanning for a bullet point. "'Automatic backups'? Check! Great, we don't have to do backups anymore, they're taking care of it."

Everyone guffawing about this probably uses RDS and trusts that the backup facility AWS provides is actually useful - and I bet it does have a saner default than auto-deleting all the backups when you delete a database. Did you explicitly check this, though? Clearly this guy will pay the price of assuming, but I can see how he must have imagined that "backups" and "will be automatically and immediately deleted..." should never be in the same sentence, unless it was like, "when XX days have passed after a DB is dropped."

When I worked for a company 10 years ago that was mistrusting of cloud anything, we had a nightly dump of the prod DB (MySQL) that, if things went really wrong, could be loaded into a new DB server, because we knew it was our responsibility because it was our server. (In our case, even our physical hardware!)