Yeah that makes sense. The vendor lock in and licensing side of Oracle is definitely a real concern, and the PL/SQL dependency can be limiting especially when it comes to hiring or long term flexibility.

But in my case, I’ve seen APEX work reasonably well mostly in setups where those trade offs are already accepted, like internal tools where everything is already built around Oracle and the focus is on working with large datasets efficiently.

I wouldn’t treat it as a general purpose stack but in those scenarios it felt more practical than building and maintaining a separate full stack system.