result = orm.query({raw sql}, parameters)

I have wonderful and trivially configurable db connection state management

I have the ability to do things really simply when i want to; i still can use the ORM magic for quick prototyping or when i know the query is actually trivial object fetching.

The result passing into an object that matches the result of the query is definitely nicer with a good ORM library than every raw SQL library i've used.

I jest, but ORMs exist for a reason. And if I were a new senior or principal on your team I’d be worried that there was now an expectation for a junior to be a wizard at anything, even more so that thing being a rich and complex RDBMS toolchain that has more potential guns pointing at feet than anything else in the stack.

I spent many years cutting Rails apps and while ActiveRecord was rarely my favourite part of those apps, it gave us so much batteries included functionality, we just realised it was best to embrace it. If AR was slow or we had to jump through hoops, that suggested the data model was wrong, not that we should dump AR - we’d go apply some DDD and CQRS style thinking and consider a view model and how to populate it asynchronously.

This is correct, but I'd say that the key was removing Rust and not using something else. Fewer moving parts, fewer JS runtime boundaries to cross, no need to make certain that the GC won't interfere, etc.

Also, basically any rewrite is a chance to drop entrenched decisions that proved to be not as great. Rewriting a large enough part of Prisma likely allowed to address quite a few pieces of tech debt which were not comfortable to address in small incremental changes. Consider "Prisma requires ~98% fewer types to evaluate a schema. Prisma requires ~45% fewer types for query evaluation.": this mush have required quite a bit of rework of the whole thing. Removing Rust in the process was likely almost a footnote.

It seems that maybe they did get hyped into Rust, because it's not clear why they believed Rust would make their JavaScript tool easier to develop, simpler, or more efficient in the first place.

While techno-religiosity is irrational and unprofessional, but that's some weak, eye-rolling both-sidesism.

The world would be a better place™ if more stuff used better and more formal tools and methods to prove that code is correct and bug-free. This is easier in some languages than others, but still, there's a lot of formal verification tools that aren't used enough and methodology patterns and attitudes that are missing from crucial projects and regular use. Effective safety and security assurance of software creation takes effort and understanding that a huge fraction of programmer non-software engineers don't want to undertake or know anything about. This needs to change and is defensible, marketable expertise that needs to be appreciated and cannot be replaced by AI anytime soon. There's no "easy" button, but there are a lot of "lazy" "buttons" that don't function as intended.

If they had been using something like Java or Go or Haskell, etc, they may well have had even more downsides.

Rust has automatic memory management.

> Complexity tax

Could you be more specific?