Do We Still Need NoSQL in 2026?

I graduated university in 2007. Back then, databases meant one thing: tables, rows, and relationships. A user has orders. Orders have products. Everything is connected, and you draw those connections carefully on a whiteboard (or a notebook) before you write a single line of code. That's just how data works, right? Things in the real world are related to each other. It makes sense to model that. Similar how classes in OOP are a natural way to model real-world entities, relational databases felt like the natural way to model real-world data. Then NoSQL came along. Suddenly, you could just throw data into a big flexible blob without worrying too much about structure or relationships. It was like someone had looked at a filing cabinet and said "what if we just used a pile on the floor instead?" Maybe that's my bias showing, or my old age. But I've been sitting with this question for a while now: do we actually need NoSQL databases in 2026, or have I just not updated my thinking since 2007