Who called it "taking a dump" and not anything else? Making a backup? No??

Some code shitter, probably.

One dump per day prevents one dumpster fire under the ass of guilty party.

Well, it literally is just dumping all the nicely structured table data as a strem of text into a single file.

If you don't want to dump your DBs, there are two easy options for that:
- Start a DBMS slave, let it sync and then shut it down again. Then backup the slave's table space.
- Stop the DBMS. Create a file system snapshot. Start the DBMS again. Backup the snapshotted table space.