I'm yet to see a backend app architecture that both is elegant and effective from developer perspective and at the same time doesn't push her to make unneccessary database calls for each request when business logic becomes significantly complex.
If you're interested, you can probably get an invite from @supermario on the elm slack, or on: https://lamdera.app/
Disclaimer: I'm not affiliated with the project, but I've met Mario in person and he's a cool dude with great ideas ;)
Are you objecting to holding all state in a database, or something else? If so, the only real alternative is to have individual servers hold state, which seems like a poor choice; one way or another you're going to hit the CAP theorem, and databases are well-optimized for getting you the best results from CAP that you're going to.