What do you use it for?

Yeah, I do that too. I also built out support for message groups and visibility timeouts with two additional columns along with support for dead lettering based on attempts.

Sure, it won’t scale; but it gets me from 0 to 1 really fast and we can deal with the issue later when it becomes a problem

A deadline tangentially helps with a few things :
- Narrows focus and forces critical thinking
- Not over-engineering or optimising something too early.
- Ship sooner to get feedback which can help make better decisions.
- Mobilise the team towards an outcome.

I have to strongly disagree on this one. I think artificial deadlines are necessary for innovation. I can accept that product quality might suffer in the near short term, but mid-to-long term, it would lead to building better product overall