> For example, my anthropologist parents used Access for analyzing their manually gathered census data for a small rural village.
That's surprising. Most of the time, this is what Excel & Wordpress are used for by non-techies, since both FileMaker and Access feel daunting to most of them. Maybe this is exclusive to museums? This is anecdotal, but I've worked in a lot of different industries, and in all of them everyone maintaining FileMaker or Access were also knowledgeable enough to code in those platforms ie. they were techies before they started using FM or Access
I know several people who use or used Access / Filemaker who were non-technical with previous experience mostly consisting of Word / light Excel use.
For example, my anthropologist parents used Access for analyzing their manually gathered census data for a small rural village.
The volunteer docents at a local museum in my hometown used Filemaker for managing the museum collection.
> whether they realize it or not, become programmers
Using the graphical tool in Access to construct queries does not require becoming a proficient programmer.
> A relational database is not a big leap from either Access or FileMaker
These are relational databases. They just have user interface affordances intended for non-technical users. Postgres does not.