I really love using dbeaver[1] as a Postgres IDE. It requires a small bit of configuration for me to use it (why are the defaults to automatically lowercase all of my SQL?!). Other than that it's excellent!
Ha, initially misread your question as its opposite (~"would reading technical/non-work related books in my spare time be a waste of time") and immediately thought no, of course not! To me, doing non-work related things outside of working is what makes _both_ activities things fun.
Don't be hard on yourself for not spending every waking minute of your life working, preparing for work, or feeling bad because you "should" be doing one of those two. That's a very quick way get burned out.
YMMV, but in my experience, even if you want to optimize your life for doing the best work possible, not working all the time is a winning strategy!
Not OP, but I've recently worked with AWS Parameter Store a lot, and I've been very happy with it so far. We store all configuration (including secrets) using it.
In practice, we have a client written in Python that grabs configuration from Parameter Store and puts it into the process' ENV variables at startup. This allows us to avoid vendor lockin in the rest of our code, since we still just fetch all config from the environment. I like it so far :)
The somewhat silly video on that page shows the actual difference in performance our users felt after the change. It was a _huge_ benefit, both in terms of loading time, but also in terms of memory, vastly increasing the number of CS:GO rounds that could be analyzed simultaneously.
[1]: https://dbeaver.io/