Delivering E2EE media without blowing up Postgres

When I launched my messenger, the media upload path looked like this: client → encrypt → POST /media/upload → INSERT INTO media (ciphertext BYTEA) Functionality was there, 2MB, 25MB (sometimes times out) and at 100MB you get blowups. Here's a brief "lessons-learned" about the road of Postgres BYTEA at scal, and the architectuer I ended up with shipping 200MB encrypte video without the server ever seeing plaintext. Why BYTEA was good at first? I've always preferred Postgres to any other DB system