Transactions around fetching/updating aren't trivial, that's true. However, the work that you're doing _is_ regular activity because it's part of your application logic. That's data about the state of your overall system and it is extremely helpful for it to stay with the app (not to mention how nice it makes testing).

Regarding overall throughput, we've written about running one million jobs a minute [1] on a single queue, and there are numerous companies running hundreds of millions of jobs a day with oban/postgres.

[1]: https://oban.pro/articles/one-million-jobs-a-minute-with-oba...