Junior developers like me were uncomfortable with SQL twenty years ago. Java ORM frameworks became popular because of the Object-Relational impedance. I kind of see the same kind of sentiment nowadays among newer generations but in Python&Co.

The success of the Apache Spark engine can at least partially be attributed to

* being able to have the same expressive power as SQL but with a real Scala API (including having reusable libraries based on it)

* being able to embed it into unit tests at a low price of additional ~20 seconds latency to spin up a local Spark master