1. You certainly need to know SQL 2. Composition is very different than concatenation and the differences become apparent as a project increases in complexity 3. I'd recommend checking out the current SOTA, especially with kysely (or Ecto if you ever get into Elixir projects)

I've used kysely extensively on a project built using sst.dev. I can't paste proprietary code, but I remember my head spinning over a particularly gnarly query (e.g. a bunch of window functions, aggregations, etc.) It was a million times more difficult to grok reading this in kysely's syntax than SQL.