Comment by fragmede

It's the tooling around them.

How do you set a boolean to only return true for queries to 5% of the fleet? And which 5% of the fleet? And then ramp up on a predefined cadence? Or how about returning true only for customers in the preview group for the feature? Does the database return false automatically if the 5% of the fleet where it's true start crashing or throwing exceptions? Does it hook into your observability stack?

Fundamentally, sure, you could just implement it as a boolean in the database. It's the integration and tooling that works with the rest of your stack that makes it worthy of the name "feature flag".