I do like this approach in theory, but agreed I don't think that the devex has been solved and I don't know how many people would value a different approach as SQL feels like king in many places... FWIW it's kind of the approach that IndexedDB in the web takes, however that the API is quite bad IMO.

Or maybe there is a higher level DSL that you could apply to create query plans (something like MongoDB aggregation pipelines maybe?), but it quickly becomes basically the same as SQL.