There are tons of databases, I just named several and there are hundreds more for every possible niche.
> "But ones that are not ours, that we cant hack on, that we cant run ourselves."
Who is "we"? Is your entire issue that not everything is open-source?
> "these are not humanity's heritdge & humanity is cut off from active participation with them."
This is still incredibly exaggerated. Everything humanity does is humanity's heritage. There are plenty of open-source databases of all types and sizes if you look: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking
Your free to your opinion, but I respectfully do not share your values & sense of collective ownership over remote, far off software I can't see, shape, control or rework.
The most notable feature of Neon, that makes it so exceptionally smart, is that it takes the humanity's existing first best choice default-go-to database, by a country mile, and layers in really smart decoupling of storage to help it scale. Reinventing things from scratch can be a win, but that this is already a well known quantity, much loved & cherished & used by all, hacked by all, grown by all is a planet-sized huge plus mark.
I think you vastly overrate the broad availability of alternatives to this, of potential starting places others might explore. Most of your list is dominated by proprietary whatever. Even skipping that, yes, there is a ton of novelty & promise, the potential for breakthroughs. But this is starting with the best, and pushing it into the cloud-layer, into the troposphere.
> "I think you vastly overrate the broad availability of alternatives to this"
There are dozens of "scalable postgres" alternatives from Redshift to Citus to CockroachDB to Yugabyte. I find it strange that you say its overrating the availability when you're also comparing it to something that isn't even a full product yet.
> "But ones that are not ours, that we cant hack on, that we cant run ourselves."
Who is "we"? Is your entire issue that not everything is open-source?
> "these are not humanity's heritdge & humanity is cut off from active participation with them."
This is still incredibly exaggerated. Everything humanity does is humanity's heritage. There are plenty of open-source databases of all types and sizes if you look: https://db-engines.com/en/ranking