It wasn’t always code first - you mention Hibernate but 15-20 years ago it was entirely feasible to inherit a database schema or design one up front, and then create performant metadata mappings to a usable object model. That sort of practise was tainted by the Bad Enterprise brushes of verbosity and XML in general, and so everyone moved to some flavour of active record. This allowed programmers to write less code and fit it into neater boxes, at a time when there was enormous demand for basic CRUD web apps, but a lot of power and expressiveness was lost.

Somewhat ironically, many modern enterprises have peeled all the way back to SQL for a huge amount of logic anyway, so I don’t think we’re done caring about database schemas quite yet.