It's also a negative side-effect of the improvement of software and automation in this space.
In ye olden times, there would be an grumpy DBA in this story terminating the query and yelling at the user. Many, many people are consuming databases without understanding how to approach SQL optimization, because nobody is forcing them to!
> DBAs playing hardass without even trying to understand the need.
Although the parent posed a caricature with "yelling", this is an even more extreme one.
The "forcing" function merely requires a bit of "hardass" but not the willful ignorance you associate with it. At the risk of going true-scotsman, I believe that competent DBAs capable of the forcing function would already understand the need without trying.
As such, I don't think there needs to be any kind of "medium" between two extremes of ignorance, but, rather, back to the GP's point, a reduction of ignorance in "what we have now".
Of course, I don't believe hardass/yelling is the best way to achieve that, either, instead favoring (original) Devops culture, but that also doesn't work if Ops (including DBA) skills aren't recognized as valuable any more (and "Devops" just means "replace Ops with Devs").
Ah, yes. I interned in the Database Administration team of a Fortune 500 company. I definitely learned a lot as a developer under the tutelage of some old school mainframers (I was primarily targeting DB2 on OS/390).
I learned a lot about query optimization in my 3 years as an intern. I also caused a few issues along the way, including a number of PR reports to IBM. Some of which were benign, like incorrect documentation. Others were more problematic, such as semantically identical queries returning different results (e.g. coalesce vs case when null in a column spec) to knocking out the entire development LPAR on the mainframe with a simple select statement (hit a bug in the query optimizer and it crashed not just the DB, but the whole LPAR).
Still, those 3 years were invaluable to me. They developed both an intuition on how to write optimal queries, but also the knowledge of how to utilize the tools to identify problems, measure and fix them. It has served me well as a developer in the 15 years since I left my internship. I don't get into fights with DBAs since they recognize I know as much or more than them about optimizing queries on datasets I work with.
In ye olden times, there would be an grumpy DBA in this story terminating the query and yelling at the user. Many, many people are consuming databases without understanding how to approach SQL optimization, because nobody is forcing them to!