You seem to be arguing for databases which exist and are structured independently of any applications which happen to access them. Personally, I think this makes about as much sense as arguing for, say electrons to have well-defined properties independently of anyone trying to measure them, which is the same as saying that there is no such thing.
You also seem to have trouble accepting that there may be lots of situations where there is exactly one application, and if that application goes away, then so does the company (or the department, or the project). In those cases, I don't see much value in trying to make the database be independent of the application; the database exists to serve that application, and if they happen to be tightly coupled to each other, so be it: sometimes that's how you get something to work.
You seem to be arguing for databases which exist and are structured independently of any applications which happen to access them. Personally, I think this makes about as much sense as arguing for, say electrons to have well-defined properties independently of anyone trying to measure them, which is the same as saying that there is no such thing.
You also seem to have trouble accepting that there may be lots of situations where there is exactly one application, and if that application goes away, then so does the company (or the department, or the project). In those cases, I don't see much value in trying to make the database be independent of the application; the database exists to serve that application, and if they happen to be tightly coupled to each other, so be it: sometimes that's how you get something to work.