I kind of want to say "y-yeah" regarding Prisma, because all this information (especially the fact that it creates a transaction every time and downloads those

I kind of want to say "y-yeah" regarding Prisma, because all this information (especially the fact that it creates a transaction every time and downloads those engines) is either available in the documentation or visible upon install/build - you can actually make it point to specific executables instead of downloading each time using environment variables but again - it's in the docs. I picked Prisma because I'm not actually a backend developer and the tradeoffs were okay for my use case. I wish performance was better, but a few indexes here and there went a long way. The only surprising bit for me was peak memory usage - it comes in bursts and can get to hundreds of MB when doing even a simple query. The queries themselves are also kind of out there in terms of complexity but so far I haven't found a reason to rewrite them in raw SQL, since that isn't where our performance bottlenecks are at the moment. The lack of rollbacks is one legitimate pain point and I wish they addressed it.