You are selling SQL way short. SQL has stuck around because, compared to its complexity, it lets you do incredibly powerful things.
Every single one, without exception, lets you do incredibly powerful things compared to its complexity.
This hasn't stopped the progression of general purpose programming languages, and I think the vast majority of developers would agree that there have been huge improvements in the last 50 years.
Apart from SQL, all of these languages are imperative, and most of them derive from C in some shape or form; K&R C was published in 1978, 44 years ago.
So, while I'd agree that there have certainly been huge incremental improvements in imperative programming in the last ~50 years, when we look at what people use on a daily basis, it's not really clear to me that the changes have been any greater in significance than the changes that SQL has gone through during the same period.
SQL is really good at its in-place one-time this-specific-case relational querying.
Things SQL is not even mediocre at: programming.
Lots of stuff untilizing SQL and the ability to do lots of cool stuff with SQL, doesn't actually mean that the Developer Experience or ergonomics around using SQL are good.
Much like C code say, it's not a feature of C the language that gcc, for example, can optimise your crappy code for whatever target platform.