This suffers from the "sufficiently smart compiler" problem. The query planner that can do what I mean with maximal efficiency is always just over the horizon. There's always yet another query that can't be optimized automatically.
The escape hatch in MSSQL for the long tail is materialising an intermediate result to temp table.
PG re-optmizes every query over and over unless you manually do a prepared statement and that only last for the session its prepared on. Therefore it's very important the optimizer not take much time before execution.
But you really should using at least query builder that does the prepared statement thing under the hood, and also because writing dynamic queries with string concatenation sucks.
That the client must explicitly prepare the statement and the preparation is tied to the connection is pretty clunky and still means the statement must be replanned for each separate connection.
Also since it is assumed by the devs of PG that prepared statements are not the norm they seem to avoid making the optimizer take its time and shoot for a fast optimizer rather than the fastest query.
DB's like MSSQL and Oracle concern themselves much less with how long it takes to optimize since repetitive queries will all use the same plan automatically it also allows interesting features like saving and loading plans from different systems and freezing them so they don't all the sudden go bad in production, but those systems also supports hints unlike PG.