I know this is unrelated, but probably a lot of Pythonistas here and I've been wondering: what is the async web framework of choice for you guys today? As for DBs, still SQLAlchemy? What about a prettier (js) alternative?
Regarding database access, my recommendation might not be popular, but I really like asyncpg[1]. They basically dropped DBAPI and instead created their own API that functionally matches PostgreSQL, giving you full control and increasing performance.
As a result of that you probably won't be able to use ORMs (there's SQLAlchemy driver, but as I understand it is hacky and you are losing the performance benefits).
Personally I compared my code with and without ORM and there's no change in number of lines. If you use PyCharm and configure it to connect to your database (I think that might be a pro feature) it will then automatically detect SQL in your strings provide autocomplete (including table and column names) and provide highlighting, removing all the advantages that ORM provided.