> With a fast backend ~1-5ms response times (not even that fast).
Even though benchmarks suggest this sort of performance should be trivial, most real-world servers I have interacted with do not reliably managed to process a request, make a roundtrip to the DB, and return a response in <5ms
But why is that?
Project into sqlite on your app server is the main trick I use. Denormalize if you have to.
Hell, for a lot of projects you don't even need to get that fancy. Run a single server with an embedde database, running Go or Java and you're good to go.