

For me, it’s worked out for plex. What it offered at the time was more than worth the price and I’ve felt a little bad about it being a once and done payment.
That being said they’ve hurt some of the good will with the changes they’ve made, but also I imagine they’re struggling to find a sustainable path for development.
These are the most common approaches I’m aware of.
The only other real alternative, without changing the underlying DB or architecture, is you could break up the database or archive data.
Many times you don’t need old data and can ship it off to S3 or something similar. Additionally, you may have tables/data that are disconnected and could be broken off into two databases. Both of these tend to just push off the inevitable, but could buy time for a larger architectural change.