Did I miss in the article where OP reveals the magic database that actually does this?
3rd party solutions like https://readyset.io/ and https://materialize.com/ exist specifically because databases don’t actually have what we all want materialized views to be.
Feldera, RisingWave, DeltaStream, Epsio, Decodable, Confluent all seem to have some offerings in this space. Probably others too!
In the analytics world, BigQuery MVs seem pretty cool. You can tune the freshness parameters, it will maintain user-specific row-level security, and even rewrite regular queries to use the pre-computed aggregates if possible.
But I don't think there is anything similar in the GCP transactional db options like Spanner or CloudSQL.
You can do targeted materialized view updates via triggers. It's definitely verbose but does give you a lot of control.
I'm currently parking PostgREST behind Fastly (varnish) for pretty much the same benefits plus edge CDNs for my read APIs. I really just use materialized views for report generation now.
These startups (and a handful of others) are what I meant!