Sounds sort of like Active Record without Arel. The things that you're mentioning do sound irritating, not being able to do joins easily, etc., seems lousy. (I

Sounds sort of like Active Record without Arel. The things that you're mentioning do sound irritating, not being able to do joins easily, etc., seems lousy. (I think Arel is a bit overlooked, but it's actually very pleasant to build complex/composable queries with it IMO.) Regarding types, the more I've used JS the more I've come to hate JS's native types for numbers and dates/times, so not terribly shocked by that, kind of think its native types being really obnoxious is part of why typescript is relatively popular. I am a bit curious - the piece of ORM-style solutions that I like is that they create a clear pattern for organizing certain kinds of application logic - for example, if there's a rule that value X meets certain conditions, usually there are tools or conventions with ORMs to make it not easy to write something that skips the rule without doing so intentionally. Whereas in codebases that don't use some sort of frameworky-ORM-y solution I often find myself thinking there aren't clear patterns of responsibility for such things, leading to bugs or poor DRY practices.