Yes, planetiler rocks and the memory mapped collections enabled us to remove our dependency to rocksdb ;)
From my perspective, planetiler started as an effort to generate vector tiles from the OpenMapTile schema as fast as possible (pbf -> mvt). By contrast, Baremaps started as an effort to create a new schema and style from the ground up. In this regard, having a database (pbf -> db <- mvt) enables to live reload changes made in the configuration files. The database has a cost, but also comes with additional advantages (updates, dynamic data, on demand generation of tiles at zoom levels 16+, etc.).
That being said, I think the two projects overlap and I hope we will find opportunities to collaborate in the future. For instance, whereas PostgreSQL is still required in Baremaps, I recently ported a lot of the ST_ function of Postgis to Apache Calcite with the intent to execute SQL on fast memory mapped collection.
https://github.com/apache/calcite/blob/main/core/src/main/ja...
A planet wide import in Postgis currently takes about 4 hours with the COPY API (easy to parallelize) followed by about 12 hours of simplification in Postgis (not easy to parallelize). I will try to publish a detailed benchmark in the future.