From TFA:

“The nice thing about boringness (so constrained) is that the capabilities of these things are well understood. But more importantly, their failure modes are well understood.”

Boring technology is that where you have an extremely small amount of “I didn’t think that was possible” events occurring. As it states, there’s always some; SQLite’s recent WAL-Reset bug that Tailscale discovered is a perfect example of that.

Actually, on the subject of databases, I think they all break that rule. I’m a DBRE, and can readily state there are an insane number of footguns with all of them. It’s just that, relative to other options, they’re as good as you’re going to get. Also in their defense, nearly every footgun I’ve ever encountered was documented, it’s just that the docs are incredibly dense, and sometimes a bit vague.