This is the fundamental flaw of 80% thinking. The fact that SQLite continues to reach for more users is what has made it such a successful general-purpose tool.
Where has it been suggested that this is the best solution for "the average SQLite user", instead of a tool you can use if it fits your requirements? To take your 10MB number, the article starts by mentioning you can probably just download the entire thing if you aren't above that exact same number.
It's not anymore unusable over high latency links than most website. Also worth noting that the caching is very smart, so once things are downloaded it's very fast.
But most high latency links are very slow (so downloading large databases is a horrible experience) and (more importantly) are often priced by the size of downloads.
> It's not anymore unusable over high latency links than most website.
That’s false. Not all web applications suffer equally from high latency links. Depends on how reliant the web application is on independent requests. Making one request and receiving a single bulk download is much less bad than making many dependent requests on a high latency link.
We're using them as a replacement for leveldb's sstables, but with the structure of full SQL. It is highly effective.