I feel at ease with SQL and like to get as close to it as possible in my Node service. But Knex still appears to be highly valuable to me to, for instance, not care about managing DB connections, at least until they become critical for my use-case.
Not care about sanitising inputs and protecting myself from SQL injections.
Have more readable and maintainable code in my repositories than SQL in plain strings as a default. Yes I have some raw queries but 98% of my queries are easy to follow knex chains.
Not care about creating and maintaining code for migrations. Running them in transactions, keeping track of and running only the ones needed, ... so happy I didn't have to re-invent that and be the responsible of it never ever failing in production.