To be totally honest, I haven’t implemented anything using RLS, it just seemed the way to go since it’s native Postgres. The Hasura team gave me the same explanation as they give in this article - when you use RLS, you have to rerun every query for every client to get your results. By doing it in the application layer, you can run a single query instead.

In terms of the setup and migrations, I also have the same reservation about it being harder to do with text. So far I’ve left it to one of the other guys to implement so it hasn’t been painful for me, yet!

Edit to add: I believe they built their version of RLS before Postgres had it. So it was more a case of Not Invented Yet