As somebody who has always used MySQL, but always been told that I should be using Postgres, I'd love to understand what the issues with VACUUM are, and what I should be aware of when potentially switching databases?
VACUUM and VACUUM FULL (and/or with ANALYZE) can lock tables for a very long time, especially when the table is large. Incantation may also require 2x the space for the table being operated on. In short: it's slow.
`VACUUM` (with or without `ANALYZE`) on its own neither locks tables nor requires additional disk space. This is what the autovacuumdvaemon is doing. `VACUUM FULL` does both, as it's doing a tuple-by-tuple rewrite of the entire table.