I enjoyed this thread (and the article) as I'm preparing to upgrade several Postgres databases from 14 to 16, which should take about 25 minutes or less.
My experience has been that most people (including devs) hardly think about their database at all. Everyone just takes the database for granted until a dev runs a bad query that locks a table. Devs let their ORM manage everything for them and don't take the time to think for themselves.
Also I rarely see teams with a culture that prioritizes maintenance, even for their own software. It's common for teams to become wary of upgrading because they do it infrequently. Like most things, the more often you perform an upgrade the easier it is. Smaller changes are easier to revert. The more often you do something, the better at it you get. Delaying maintenance often just increases the work later.