@jonocarroll good post (and I 100% agree)! I have not try duckdb but my memory using PG is that with dbt you can also set up a staging / per user /branch. You are not just promoting code but also data (kind of). In fact you need it for validation. You can also do that with targets using multiple "stores". I think gittarget help here but I usually use my crappy function that switch store if not on main branch. I find validation tests slightly easier with dbt but never tried data.validator.