How does Airbyte work or deal with replication / views as opposed to just creating entirely new tables from the sources when I want to exclude specific data? (creating views instead of entire whole tables of data)
Airbyte doesn’t duplicate the artifacts (tables, views, functions) of your database and recreate in your destination. Today Airbyte will ingest data from the source (tables, views, materialized views, source APIs), convert the data to the AirbyteMessage format and emit them to your destination.
This allow Airbyte to connect any source to any destination, however lost some features like the option to recreate the source database in your destination. Maybe in the future a feature that allow this will be available.