A bit earlier in the module, it's mentioned that dialectOptions might be necessary on Heroku specifically.

So I suspect this is an artifact from that environment. I can confirm however that this won't work on Postgres server running in Docker container for example, since SSL is not supported out of the box. There is a way to rebuild the image using certificate-based authentication and OpenSSL, but I really think that's outside of the scope of this module, even for the standards of this course.

So I agree that the line should be left to simple const sequelize = new Sequelize(process.env.DATABASE_URL), especially now that Heroku doesn't offer a free tier and Fly.io doesn't support managed Postgres.

Just bear in mind that you should changed it consistently in all occurrences or none at all.

fixed in another commit