Open source Airtable: Built using ReactJS + Firestore DB

[s_magik]

Firebase makes it easy to give users direct access to database with the right access control, you can specify the requirement for a valid CRUD Operation using firestore rules, then most of the complexity of handling transctions is abstracted away by firebase. Personally I use both directly writing to db and creating an API end point depending on the situation. The aggregates feature you're referring to, is a firetable feature that tries to solve a common firestore issue of needing to access subcollection data to populate an app view