Thank you for your response. I have tested out the patch in the linked thread and it works very well on a bunch of complex queries that I have tested, improving both the planning time significantly and the execution time drastically.
I have also read through the entire linked discussion thread as well as a few other large threads linked from it, and found the discussion very interesting. I don't believe that all such queries are "poorly-written". As was discussed in the other threads, the reason these types of self-joins can occur is when you use SQL views. You can create a library of reusable views that are small, easy-to-understand and readable. Then you build them up into bigger views, and finally query from them. But then you end up with lots of (hidden) self-joins. The alternative is to copy&paste the shared logic from the views into all of the queries. I understand the need to be conservative about which optimizations to apply in order to not waste time looking for opportunities that don't exist. One idea I had that I didn't see mentioned is the following heuristic: Only if a query references an SQL view (or multiple views), then try to apply the self_join_removal optimization. This should be enough, because as you say, no human would intentionally write such a query. Queries generated by ORMs were also discussed, so I believe it might also be beneficial to consider queries that contain inner SELECTs.
