The best infrastructure I've ever worked with had a quality that's hard to describe to anyone who hasn't experienced it: nobody talked about it. The engineers shipped features. The system handled the load. When something broke, the logs said exactly what happened. Nobody spent mental energy on the substrate because the substrate didn't ask for any.
The closest analog I've found outside of software is how a photograph can make its own construction disappear. When a photo works, you don't see the aperture choice or the waiting or the decision about where to stand. You see whatever the photo is about. The effort becomes invisible in the result.
This happens in both cases for the same reason: the thing is serving its purpose without drawing attention to how. The moment users start thinking about the database, or viewers start thinking about the photographer, something has usually gone sideways.
The systems I've built that people have actually adopted over time tend to have this quality. When I ask how things are going, I get answers about features and product decisions, not about reliability or latency. That's the feedback I'd take over any benchmark.
Getting there requires a lot of decisions that don't show up anywhere visible: things ruled out, abstractions kept shallow on purpose, complexity absorbed in the implementation rather than exported to the interface. From the outside, people just feel that the system gives them less to think about.