SQL wins because big iron wins. At the end of the day, the big, clunky, slow, complicated, aggravating, old systems stick around because they are built to stick around.
Looking at, say, an eventually consistent distributed decentralized kv store, one might be tricked into believing it's simple enough to deploy with enough nodes and general enough interfaces that you can build a complicated system on top of it if needed, and rely on its supppsed simplicity and scalability the rest of the time. But nobody tells you about the shitty implementation. The replication that doesn't resume, the stodgy transfers, the imbalanced distribution, the consensus conflict, the infinitely expanding disk, the churning CPU. How at scale, if all the other aspects of your infra aren't scaling along with your data size, the whole thing blows.
Traditional SQL databases end up being many times simpler in practice, and because of their inherent scaling limitations, much easier to manage. And most importantly: their implementations aren't buggy.
SQL is just more reliable.
Looking at, say, an eventually consistent distributed decentralized kv store, one might be tricked into believing it's simple enough to deploy with enough nodes and general enough interfaces that you can build a complicated system on top of it if needed, and rely on its supppsed simplicity and scalability the rest of the time. But nobody tells you about the shitty implementation. The replication that doesn't resume, the stodgy transfers, the imbalanced distribution, the consensus conflict, the infinitely expanding disk, the churning CPU. How at scale, if all the other aspects of your infra aren't scaling along with your data size, the whole thing blows.
Traditional SQL databases end up being many times simpler in practice, and because of their inherent scaling limitations, much easier to manage. And most importantly: their implementations aren't buggy.
SQL is just more reliable.