I feel similarly. I think people just tend to be put off by SQL and the programmer answer of 'just another abstraction' takes over.

It's not good, but it's not bad enough to justify ORM complexity. Then again I've worked in places where no one knew what an index was so maybe they make sense in such environments.

Just wishing there was no mismatch between idiomatic SQL schemas and idiomatic programming data structures (join (join (join ....

Working directly with SQL does feel a bit like peppering your modern codebase with COBOL.

There are some middle grounds https://github.com/prql/prql