For others, the short-ish answer is that doing hundreds of SQL queries in response to a request (loading nested timeline elements in their case) in SQLite is fine because of the lack of networking/IPC overhead. The nature of N+1 queries is unchanged.
The other half of it that the sqlite page doesn't mention is that sqlite lacks query engine optimizations which would make one large query faster than many smaller queries. If you had a hypothetical in-process version of postgres which didn't have any IPC or networking overhead you'd still see benefits from performing fewer larger queries when using it because the query planner adds some overhead to small queries but makes complex queries faster.
I'm wondering how would it perform if we can compile https://pglite.dev/ as a native library and use it as an in-process Postgres... I know Node folks already use it as a Wasm module, so it shouldn’t be too tricky?
For others, the short-ish answer is that doing hundreds of SQL queries in response to a request (loading nested timeline elements in their case) in SQLite is fine because of the lack of networking/IPC overhead. The nature of N+1 queries is unchanged.