> on the surface looks like an ORM but is in fact a set of clever functions that write SQL

Honest question -- what's the difference?

Usually the problems with ORMs stem from the fact that they are exactly clever functions that write SQL. The cleverness abstracts features of SQL that are important for performance and also makes it easy to do things that are bad for performance.

I'm not saying that the ecosystems you mentioned aren't doing something different, I just don't know what it is from how you've described their DB layers.