there are so many intersecting problems here, that I feel like we argue about different ones at the same time.
Are you a human and want to query a database? SQL is probably it. (a SQL of some sort, but a pretty good shared understanding) Even if it's not relational exactly, it probably comes with some project with things like records/rows and columns/fields.
Do you have some kind of relational model that needs accessing? SQL sounds pretty good, and you know it from writing queries as a human...
But should you construct queries with string concatenation? No! Absolutely not.
Do you have to write the queries yourself? Like what if you want to stick an object in a database? Can't it write the query for you? It's appealing, but leads to sadness and anger at some point. (Joins? Conditions of more than 2 degrees? lots of dark corners very close by)
AND whatever model objects are used become a defacto database schema, so you can't really refactor them in the same way you would other models. So you better not expose them past whatever datastore touching interface you have. So why not just define them in SQL DDL in the first place?
What if you want to write the query (or need to to be sure you're getting exactly what you expect) but type-safely? LINQ? Absolutely! jOOQ? Sounds good! Arel? Sure! And maybe you get some amount of programmatic composability as well with any of these. Thankfully they're not really ORMs or extremely thin ones at that.
There's a scene in Kim Stanley Robinson's 2312 that I think about often:
Habits begin to form at the very first repetition. After that there is a tropism toward repetition, for the patterns involved are defenses, bulwarks against time and despair.
He [Wahram] was very aware of this, having lived the process many times; so he paid attention to what he did when he traveled, on the lookout for those first repetitions that would create the pattern of that particular moment in his life. So often the first time one did things they were contingent, accidental, and not necessarily good things on which to base a set of habits. There was some searching to be done, in other words, some testing of different possibilities. that was the interregnum, in fact, the naked moment before the next exfoliation of habits, the time when on wandered doing things randomly. The time without skin, the raw data, the being-in-the-world.
The struggle between semantic and page description is old. In some early arguments HTML "what's this markup thing, why not postscript with hyperlinks?" the most succinct counter argument was "yes, but what does it _mean_". But that was minority for sure.
Someone called this "the revenge of NeWS" (the Sony system) but I can't find a reference for that.
