Hosted Looker and many other tools are getting direct DB access these days and I'm sure you use products that do it. As an engineer I'm not a fan of it and it can often cause problems so it's best to point them at read replicas but that is not always how companies set them up.
Exactly - you beat me to it. Looker is the canonical example. I think folks would be up for a rude awakening if they really understood how many companies use Looker (or similar advanced analytics apps -- Sisense, ThoughtSpot, etc.) and how directly they connect to DBs.