Law and order is a euphemism for free minority labor. Build the laws to keep jails full since those lameo historical killjoys made outright slavery illegal.
But here, the API is open and I can run my own copy and train my own LLM same as anyone else. It's not one asshole who decides to whom and for how much he'll sell the content we all gave him for free, so he can justify his $193 million paycheck.
Is there a language that anyone would say really does fare well for continued development or is it just that few people enjoy maintaining code? I've maintained some pretty old Go programs I wrote and didn't mind it at all. I've inherited some brand new ones and wanted to rage quit immediately. I've also hated my own code too, so it's not just whether or not I wrote it.
I have found maintainability is vastly more about the abstractions and architecture (modules and cohesive design etc) chosen than it is about the language.
There were 12 of these angry dogs, though. Not one trusting dog in a cinder pit. I don't know if Noem would have been able to handle it even with a gun.
The real primary benefit of storing your relationships in a separate place is that it becomes a point of entry for scans or alterations instead of scanning all entries of one of the larger entity types. For example, "how many users have favorited movie X" is a query on one smaller table (and likely much better optimized on modern processor architectures) vs across all favorites of all users. And "movie x2 is deleted so let's remove all references to it" is again a single table to alter.
Another benefit regardless of language is normalization. You can keep your entities distinct, and can operate on only one of either. This matters a lot more the more relationships you have between instances of both entities. You could get away with your json array containing IDs of movies rather than storing the joins separately, but that still loses for efficiency when compared to a third relationship table.
The biggest win for design is normalization. Store entities separately and updates or scans will require significantly less rewriting. And there are degrees of it, each with benefits and trade-offs.
Of course I avoid him. He's me!