On your main point, yes, you need to understand how pgbouncer works, it has its quirks and limitations. In particular a dev needs to be aware of how sessions and transactions work if they have some critical transactions. When introducing pgbouncer on one of our rails project we had to fine tune ActiveRecord to play nice, but once it's done there wasn't much to adjust from there.
I'm with on how much it would help if it had a magic mode without these quirks, but in my experience you're still ahead of MySQL and its per session configuration quirks for instance. On a day to day basis, you'll rarely be scratching your head about how to deal with the pgbouncer pooling behavior you chose, an you'll still have the option to directly hit the DB on anything you don't trust the pooler to deal with appropriately.
For the bugs, those are mostly on the security and configuration side. For the few years I've used it, I never hit a behavioral bug TBH.
I'm with on how much it would help if it had a magic mode without these quirks, but in my experience you're still ahead of MySQL and its per session configuration quirks for instance. On a day to day basis, you'll rarely be scratching your head about how to deal with the pgbouncer pooling behavior you chose, an you'll still have the option to directly hit the DB on anything you don't trust the pooler to deal with appropriately.
For the bugs, those are mostly on the security and configuration side. For the few years I've used it, I never hit a behavioral bug TBH.