> a good IDE will provide type-checking and even data-source checking to raw SQL anyways

I've never in my life heard of this, which IDE are you talking about? I'd love to use something like that! I'm in C# land where I can use Management Studio to write queries which works well enough, but going between that and Visual Studio does have some friction.

Even though we use Entity Framework here, I mostly use it to manage migrations than to work with data. Most of the time unless a query is really trivial, I'll just write some SQL and use Dapper for object mapping, I find it a lot easier once the query gets to be over three or four lines or so.