However, some recent performance struggles with Postgres (the details don't matter to this post, so I won't bore you with them) have made me wonder whether I'm missing out on anything. Are there general-purpose RDBMS products that are worth choosing over Postgres today? Or are they all roughly at the same level?
As far as I know, the commercial database space has been significantly reduced the last decade or two. The two remaining top players are Oracle and Microsoft, while earlier giants like DB2 and Informix probably mainly survive as legacy software. Then there are niche players like Vertica and VoltDB, which I know little about.
I've used Oracle and loved the incredible feature set, but then there's Oracle-the-company. Similarly, I've used Microsoft SQL Server and enjoyed its excellent performance and extensive feature set, but it's been many years, and I don't know how it stacks up today. DB2 was also a pleasant experience, but it's a long time since I used it.