Hey, author here. I&#x27;m surprised this got posted to HN. Anecdotally, when I first looked into ways to handle this, we tested recursive CTEs, and they didn&#x27;t perform as well for our workload.<p>The indexed arrays work well for doing lots of queries of descendants, though are harder to manage.<p>One nice thing is that this approach worked well with ActiveRecord, while at the time CTE support was a bit awkward.<p>I&#x27;d love to see some people benchmark other approaches.