Without knowing details, I can only assume you are misunderstanding something. I and everyone I worked with have bugs prevented by FK constraints. They prevent getting data to be in bad state, instead of it piling up and expensively fixing it afterwards. Not once have I thought "I wouldn't have had this problem without FKs" and every time I thought "oh yeah, I forgot this path, that would have been a problem".
Having to write code that can handle foreign key violations because the DB doesn't check it is a major pain. (we use Cassandra for example, so there is a "foreign key" usually from a PG row to a Cassandra row, obviously that can't be enforced on DB level so application code has to do the work)
As for deleting/updating data, FKs can be a bit annoying, but postgresql for example has two (possibly more) options.
1) The (possibly dangerous) cascade delete, which will traverse the FKs basically for you and deletes them
2) The check FKs (and other constraints) on commit. I.e. instead of checking every delete/update statement causes FKs violations, it'll check at the end, after having done all the delete/update statements if there are any FK violations. (or update statements). Called deferrable constraints.
Having to write code that can handle foreign key violations because the DB doesn't check it is a major pain. (we use Cassandra for example, so there is a "foreign key" usually from a PG row to a Cassandra row, obviously that can't be enforced on DB level so application code has to do the work)
As for deleting/updating data, FKs can be a bit annoying, but postgresql for example has two (possibly more) options.
1) The (possibly dangerous) cascade delete, which will traverse the FKs basically for you and deletes them 2) The check FKs (and other constraints) on commit. I.e. instead of checking every delete/update statement causes FKs violations, it'll check at the end, after having done all the delete/update statements if there are any FK violations. (or update statements). Called deferrable constraints.