I am willing to concede to “human readable” and dropping “string” iff queries on TIMESTAMP are producing a human readable string (I believe they are … I haven’t been in postgres in at least six weeks and details like that don’t make a lasting impression in muh brain)

Why would queries on TIMESTAMP not produce human readable strings? Postgres has defaulted to a human readable mask for timestamp presentation for at least 25 years.

Never say never but I honestly cannot imagine a situation where storing a date as a string is preferable to a native type.

E: In a situation where you are processing user input (API, data file) and want to preserve exactly what was presented to your system. Arguably when processing a CSV or JSON payload there is not TIMESTAMP type so the "timestamp" is legitimately a string. The point is always choose the appropriate type.

See Current: https://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/datatype-datetime.ht...

And 7.1 (2001-04-13): https://www.postgresql.org/docs/7.1/datatype-datetime.html (Section 3.4.2)