> It's a spectrum.

For web servers specifically, no, SQLite is not generally part of that spectrum. That makes as much sense as saying that in a kitchen, you want a spectrum of knives from Swiss Army Knives to chef's knives. No -- Swiss Army Knives are not part of the spectrum. For web servers, you do have a wide spectrum of database options from single servers to clusters to multi-region clusters, along with many other choices. But SQLite is not generally part of that spectrum, because it's not client-server.

> since you'll still need to migrate your local Postgres to a central Postres

No you don't. You leave your DB in-place and turn off the web server part. Or even if you do want to migrate to something beefier when needed, it's basically as easy as copying over a directory. It's nothing compared to migrating from SQLite to Postgres.

> since it's still using the SQL standard.

No, every variant of SQL is different. You'll generally need to review every single query to check what needs rewriting. Features in one database work differently from in another. Most of the basic concepts are the same, and the basic syntax is the same, but the intermediate and advanced concepts can have both different features and different syntax. Not to mention sometimes wildly different performance that needs to be re-analyzed.

> that's pretty much acknowledging the other one is simpler to setup and maintain.

No it's not. What logic led you there...? They're basically equally simple to set up and maintain, but one also scales while the other doesn't. That's the point.

The main advantage of SQLite has nothing to do with setup and maintenance, but rather the fact that it is file-based and can be integrated into the binary of other applications, which makes it amazing for locally embedded databases used by user-installed applications. But these aren't advantages when you're running a server. And it becomes a problem when you need to scale to multiple webservers.

SQLite in Production: Lessons from Running a Store on a Single File