As a 25 year “veteran” programmer, I’m glad I’m not the only one that likes the original schema (with indexes added). A fully normalized table is a lot more difficult to read, troubleshoot, and reason about. You would need a pretty good query to poke around the data.
When I first started using postgres I was amazed at how much of what I thought was "database knowledge" was actually "working around limitations of the versions of mysql I'd been using" knowledge.
These days, sure, the original schema plus indices would work fine on pretty much anything I can think of. Olde mysqls were a bit special though.
