I haven't used them, but https://github.com/koskimas/kysely and https://github.com/RobinBlomberg/kysely-codegen are doing some interesting things with TypeScript, focusing just on generating SQL queries, quite a bit more lightweight than Prisma.
For a theoretical new Node + TypeScript + SQL project, the three options I would consider are, from most-ORMy to least:
- Prisma
- Kysely + kysely-codegen (query builder)
- slonik + @slonik/typegen (raw postgres driver with good types; not sure if there's a good MySQL equivalent)