I think ActiveRecord beats this, since the code ends up more readable, but you can still run it in the rails repl, and the generated SQL syntax is printed in both the webserver logs and the repl output.
It's subjective and I tend to disagree. Especially for very simple and very complex queries.
Also, unless you are a following a "code-first" approach and doing all your schema migrations through the ORM, you have to redefine your tables, columns and relationships a second time and keep them up-to-date with every change, which is a huge hassle.
Obviously if your app is a simple CRUD app, might be simpler to just use Rails/Django/Symfony with an ORM and embrace the code-first approach.
In fact, I'd argue that the "code-first" approach as you call it is actually more useful, because rails gives you bindings for before/after commit hooks, validators that aren't supported by SQL, etc.
> Also, unless you are a following a "code-first" approach and doing all your schema migrations through the ORM
I've literally never heard of a rails team migrating their DBs manually. Everyone uses ActiveRecord because it's a joy to use and very well supported and documented.