SQLite is _the_ tool of choice for local SQL databases with minimal overhead. If you needed a single file DB for an OLAP workload, SQLite was still the best option even if the technology wasn't an ideal fit. Duckdb is exciting specifically because SQLite/duckdb aren't comparable; we can stop shoehorning OLAP into an OLTP database.

I ran into this myself; I tried using SQLite to store the results of whole-internet rDNS scan and a count() over the entire DB could take 8 minutes. I used the wrong DB for the job and the narrative around SQLite/duckdb is around reckoning with perfectly reasonable limitations and tradeoffs that SQLite made.