Where did you get that idea? Postgres can run as any user.

In fact, I recently switched my applications to use Postgres even during unit tests (instead of SQLite), i.e. that testing instance runs under my normal login user. That change actually made the CI go faster because compiling the Go SQLite driver takes much much longer (about 30-60 seconds) than spinning up a Postgres from scratch in a temp directory (about 2 seconds) and using that instead.

@fizixer: I don't use MySQL, but I've heard it's not nearly as bad as it once was. I use PostgreSQL for everything from traditional relational data to time series to job queues and am 100% satisfied. Hasn't once let me down. The only caveat is that clustering is still easier to do with MySQL than with Postgres from what I hear, so if you have really really big setups that require that, that should be considered.

I have also written heavy amounts of Python and Java at various points in my career. A few other languages too.

PHP has many, many bad spots. It's easily the ugliest, clumsiest language I have been paid to use.

It's slightly dated, but this is still the best summary I know of:

https://eev.ee/blog/2012/04/09/php-a-fractal-of-bad-design/

There where, and continue to be, large numbers of bad parts. Magic methods that do random things in certain cases, terribly defined interfaces (array_search), ridiculous typing, an impossibly incoherent standard library, etc.