Not true in my experience

All of my jobs big (1k+ engineers) and small (me), the BE engineers had read access to most databases. The larger companies have some access controls, but if you needed access, it was almost always given.

That's a fair comment, If anything them not being locked down makes access to databases easier to connect to Outerbase. I agree that users should learn SQL, even when you use EZQL it returns the actual SQL in a fully-editable IDE that can be modified in whatever way you would want. Do you think that the existing tools out there provide a good environment for those non-technical teams to learn SQL? Maybe I'm biased but I have never been a huge fan of accessing data from the majority of the existing tools as they feel outdated and like tools built mostly for engineers.

I agree with everything, but will push back about everyone having access to everything.. I hope that's mostly read-only or at least a very robust auditing/logging strategy employed. At $WORK, we give basically every employee a DB role in Postgres, but we use table/row level access control(s) and most can only see their own records, or the records of their employees(if they are a manager). We encourage them to learn SQL(most don't). We also do strong audit/logging controls(essentially pg_audit) so we track every DB change, forever. Otherwise I completely agree with you that data is almost always quite messy. I can't imagine their EZSQL stuff would work on our data at all. We have tried various other data finding magic stuff, and all of it without fail is basically useless once attached to real data that has lived in the wild for a while(we have data back to the 1990's in our database).