"Developer tries to fix something in their local environment, gets it working, then finds it gets thrown away when they restart Kubernetes. Winds up convinced that PostgreSQL is broken."
No, it tries to fix the problem of Postgres managed hosting companies, where users can use ALTER SYSTEM but can't change *.conf - all of the people driving this, work for companies that offer managed hosting. The "Developer tries..." is just a fake argument, b/c "We, the Postgres hosting companies want this" would probably not work. So it's the "For the developer ..."
In 25 years I never used ALTER SYSTEM in Postgres for my local development, I always made changes to *.conf - if for the idiotic reason that whatever you Google, you get an answer to change some entry in *.conf not an answer to ALTER SYSTEM
No, it tries to fix the problem of Postgres managed hosting companies, where users can use ALTER SYSTEM but can't change *.conf - all of the people driving this, work for companies that offer managed hosting. The "Developer tries..." is just a fake argument, b/c "We, the Postgres hosting companies want this" would probably not work. So it's the "For the developer ..."
In 25 years I never used ALTER SYSTEM in Postgres for my local development, I always made changes to *.conf - if for the idiotic reason that whatever you Google, you get an answer to change some entry in *.conf not an answer to ALTER SYSTEM