Thank you for this! I think SQL is a great language, and I've always wanted to write straight SQL with compiler guarantees, as projects like Esqueleto almost let me do.
For rapid prototyping, I think ORMs are still the best solution. However, their benefits start to diminish when scaling the team and product start becoming priorities. Working /with/ the database becomes a lot more fruitful than trying to wrangle it to your format. After all, web applications are just database skins.
> ...I've always wanted to write straight SQL with compiler guarantees...
SQL Server Data Tools does this exceedingly well. It's a Microsoft-built addon to Visual Studio.
Catching errors during compilation of SQL files is certainly very helpful! They also provide a very nice diff tool where you can diff between your project SQL files and a given server/database or between 2 different projects or 2 different databases... It also has a nice data-diff tool. (All for SQL Server only of course.)
This tool helped me very much to replace heavy ORMs (such as EntityFramework and so on) with just Dapper and a bunch of query procedures that are kept in the database itself (known as Stored Procedures in SQL Server). More detail on my setup in this comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14852425
One of the things I was really excited about with the Drizzle MySQL fork a long time ago was how they were planning to make the server side SQL language supported through plugins. Being able to use the same language on the front-end and for stored procedures would be really nice. For me, that's Perl, but for a lot of people it's probably Python, Ruby, Java or some JVM, derivative, etc. To be sure, there are downsides (not the least of which is making it easier to load a lot of logic on the SQL server which may be much harder to scale if you aren't careful), but it would also make it much easier to do some complex SQL operations.
For rapid prototyping, I think ORMs are still the best solution. However, their benefits start to diminish when scaling the team and product start becoming priorities. Working /with/ the database becomes a lot more fruitful than trying to wrangle it to your format. After all, web applications are just database skins.