I'm currently in the process of porting api code from .net 3.2 soap where the code is a mixture of string based SQL queries and stored procedures to a .net core 3.1 webapi mvc + ef.

Let me tell you... readability and type saftey are a boons. Not a curse.

Things still get convoluted but boy the errors that can sneak into a complex sql statement are painful to debug.

As always the pendulum in this "article/rant" is swinging in the other direction ("everything was better in the past"). Also it's fricking (almost) 7 years old. That's a lifetime in software development.