> Most obviously, Java has JDBC. I think .NET has an equivalent. Drivers are needed but they're often first party, coming directly from the DB vendor itself.
So it's an external dependency that is not part of Java. It doesn't really matter if the code comes from the vendor or not. Especially for OpenSource databases.
DBMS vendor providing the client is nice. At least if you're using pg-native in Node, that's just a wrapper around the Postgres-owned libpq, but I've run into small breaking updates before that I don't feel would've happened if Postgres maintained both.