> my claim is that the reality of the hosted product is that it frequently suggests that you add indexes
But it auto-suggests what index to use and has a button for you to immediately apply it. I'd say it definitely intends for you to avoid learning how indexes in MongoDB work. The index suggestions it makes are often terrible.
> performance [which is laughable even with indexes]
It really depends on your use-case and how you can structure and query your data. For one such service I'm the lead on I haven't found anything faster that doesn't sacrifice the ability to do more generic queries when we occasionally need to. (Yes we've benchmarked against postgres json fields which is always everyone's first suggestion)