I'd highly recommend people to stay away from Firebase. The querying options are really lacking. You'll likely get much better performance for much cheaper, and easier to develop for with a cheap postgres instance.
I don't mind using SQL (and I would actually prefer it) but what I want to avoid is having to build an api middleware with auth for my personal projects. Are there any alternatives to firebase you would recommend that would allow me to use SQL without having to build out an API?
Check out postgraphile, and graphile starter - https://github.com/graphile/starter
Combined with graphql-codegen you can essentially generate react hooks from a Postgres schema. It’s awesome - and all typed if you’re using typescript too