FWIW, I found reactive support a bit quirky w/ Quarkus/Hibernate/Panache...feels like hibernate reactive isn't really there yet.

Why even use hibernate if you want to be all reactive

ORM caching, etc.

What about spring webflux/r2dbc? How solid is that?

Haven't tried that yet... One other problem is when you try UI using an extension that only supports JDBC. E.g. the panache-kotlin extension on Quarkus is only JDBC. If you add that to your app, you'll get lots of conflicts.