It's not a time saver, unless you are small and one developer works on both sides of integration. Integration through database is an antipattern, because it makes apps strongly coupled and fragile and building an app on top of Heroku Connect database adds extra management and maintenance costs, required to keep both sides in sync.
It's definitely an antipattern, but if you're unfortunate enough to be on Salesforce it certainly beats writing in Apex (which also exposes you to the underlying object schema anyway).
