It’s tech debt, but it’s cheap debt. 80Mb isn’t much to have to worry about. There are many ways to use a DB of that size that will be “good enough”. So long as the queries were returning fast enough and the dev overhead wasn’t too much (LFS was a good choice), I’m not sure I’d have worried much.

There is tech debt that will eat away at you, and then there is this… something that you’ll want to replace someday, but it can wait until you are ready to tackle it properly. And you may not even know what data access patterns you need right away. For a new company with a pretty new way of working with insurance, this seems like a good trade off to me. Plus, it seems clear that they weren’t confident in their backend engineering yet, so this gave them time to figure things out.