HN user
Our team ended up having the oncall engineer for the week also work primarily on bug squashing and anything that makes support easier. Over time the support and monitoring becomes better. Basically dedicated tech debt capacity, which has worked well for us.
Can’t you do number 2 with Postgres pipelining? Here’s an article from bit.io (serverless Postgres w/ data repos) their example is inserts but also works for read ops.
https://innerjoin.bit.io/the-distance-dilemma-measuring-and-... https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/libpq-pipeline-mode....
Some companies actually look for this. IIRC rippling has a specific job posting for this.