Comment by evanelias

As a concept, declarative schema management isn't crazy at all. Several thousand companies use this approach, including some huge names like Google, Meta, and GitHub, but many smaller companies too.

When implemented well, with appropriate guardrails and linters, it's perfectly safe. And it has many benefits over imperative schema migrations, such as a substantially better Git versioning flow, and ability to synchronize environments / solve schema drift natively.

The only major conceptual downsides are the inability to handle row data migrations, and inability to handle renames. These can be major hurdles for some smaller companies, but are more irrelevant at companies with large DB infrastructure, who require special-case handling for those operations anyway. In other words, if you have large tables, row data migrations are already substantially more complex than running a single UPDATE statement, and you can't do them using a traditional imperative migration tool anyway.

> there is no chance I wouldn't inspect and possibly modify the generated "diff" migration

Of course, you're generally supposed to do that with these tools. Database changes should always be reviewed carefully. Same with non-database-related infrastructure-as-code tools.