am i missing something? what does this offer over raw sql? it honestly looks very similar

It is raw sql. The update here is more of a "workflow" change.

In the past we only offered tools to create a sql migration to make a change to your database. Now you can write the state of your database into files, then the migration is generated for you.

This is very similar to something like Rails/Phoenix/whatever, where you write your models and then it generates a change. The difference is that here you write your models in raw SQL, rather than an ORM