Knex isn’t an ORM, it’s a query builder. (Though the closely related library Bookshelf.js is an ORM).

I know your pain of translating SQL back to the ORM language, but what similar difficulty do you have for Knex? You have a query, and it’s isomorphic to the Knex query usually. There are a few things Knex doesn’t do, but it has the “raw” get-out-of-jail-free card for making part of the query just a string without sacrificing anything else.

Every project I’ve ever worked on has many closely related complex queries and writing them out as strings (even with placeholders) becomes either perilous as you write complex string building logic, or tediously repetitive.