People who has been maintaining the kernel and weathered multiple fads are wary to see if new guards will “stick”, or just stay along for a year or five, disappear and leave the old guard with shit.

The answer is impossible to answer until you tell us more about your needs. Better choice considering what?

In general, untill you have terabytes of data or a significant amount of traffic (operations per second) database choice does not matter and you should be using cheaper option, where the cost should be assessed as a derivative of price of hosting, cost per operation, cost to deliver (how familiar you are with it).

When you have significant amount of data or traffic - only then you should worry about database kind or language. Until then this could be a premature optimization.