All of these choices seem reasonable except letting an ORM be a sticking point.

Is there an institutional issue with SQL knowledge or is it exceedingly complex database?

As someone who finds ORMs more trouble than they're worth I really struggle with that point, particularly if it's SQLite.

And while Go's testing framework is really nice, I've never had much issue doing unit testing in Rust. I'm assuming the problem was more with the testing + the tauri framework than Rust itself.

The ent orm for golang actually does some useful work for you. https://github.com/ent/ent