To me, the fundamental difficulty in managing databases is the amount of state they have, the time it takes to move that state around, and the difficulty in keeping it in sync.
Whether it's Cassandra, MySQL, or PostgreSQL, bringing up a new instance takes time, orders of magnitude more than replacing some stateless service. Network mountable volumes help, because that state mostly lives on whatever provides that, but you still need to account for "moving" it into the cache.
Additionally, you necessarily have shared state that you cannot ever reset. A lot of the usefulness from "cattle" servers is that you have a clear way to reset them to a known good state. In most cases you cannot do that with your data.
Some of the mechanics of a cattle management system like Kubernetes still work but they're on timelines that give the cluster operators headaches.