IIRC, right on the heels of Meteor we got Apollo from the same folks...

The thing is, I'm puzzled, given the insane unnecessary complexity all this ES2030 and "build toolchains" (who knew javascript needed to be compiled, are we making binary bitstreams? is this an embedded microcontroller? is this an FPGA?) and other esoteric "let's replicate all of comp-sci in the browser" frontend tech, why on earth do such smart folks need the backend as a service? surely such folks who can deal with webpack build scripts can write a little php or ruby or java or something...? What is with this desire to completely neutralize and gut the backend stack? why on earth invert what a webserver is? Request=> Response (which might possibly be a rendered webpage) do folks actually think any of this is necessary and/or good?

Look, I'm all for web API's, web audio, webrtc, etc... I just don't see where a database in the browser is anything but 'cruisin for a bruisin'...

it's not like databases get their own dedicated servers or anything..

or do you mean something like a mobile app using pouchdb? "offline first and syncing to a single real database in the cloud as soon as one rejoins the network"

because a browser-based database can only ever be a compromise, such that a compelling reason could force it, but that's something akin to "DB per user" aka the Couch/Pouch ecosystem.