Someone should take that and submit it upstream.

Intel is fine too, for some uses.

"out of the frying pan into the fire"...

I'd like to avoid wasm too...

I always hope for "just a bunch of if statements" ... this is not it.

Depending on what you are doing, the above is not necessarily bad.. often much better than an SQL that locks an entire table (potentially blocking the whole DB, if this is one of the key tables).