It's not a strawman, it's reductio ad absurdum. SQL and Python are both languages that are commonly used. It would be (currently; who knows in a few years) laughable if someone said they didn't need to deeply understand Python to be able to correctly write Python at an employable level, modulo experience levels - I don't expect a Junior to know the vagaries of the language, e.g. that bools are aliased to integers.

> Even developers know little SQL unless it's their specific focus.

Yes, and I believe this to be deeply problematic. We don't generally allow people to use a language they don't understand in production, except for SQL.

> Where I live, every college level developer went through multiple semesters of database courses and yet I don't see these people proficient in SQL.

That's horrifying.

Look, while I would love it if everyone writing SQL knew relational algebra, basic set theory, and the ins and outs of their specific RDBMS implementation, I think the below suffices for the majority of work in web dev:

    SELECT: extract the columns that are named, optionally with an alias with AS (or simply a space)
    FROM: the [main] table to extract columns from
    [INNER] JOIN: an additional table to examine, returning only their intersection
    LEFT [OUTER] JOIN: an additional table to examine, returning everything in the LHS table, as well as any matches from the RHS table, with NULLs filling in missing data
    RIGHT [OUTER] JOIN: the same as LEFT JOIN, but with the logic swapped
    FULL [OUTER] JOIN: an additional table to examine, returning the union of both tables, regardless of matches
    ON: an expression to use for joining tables, generally consisting of at least one column from each table to match
    WHERE: a predicate (or series of predicates, with boolean operators joining them) to use for filtering the result set
    ORDER BY: one or more columns to order the result set by, in either ascending (ASC) or descending (DESC) order
    GROUP BY: one or more columns (though strictly speaking, this number must match the number of non-aggregated columns in the SELECT) to group the result set by
    LIMIT: a limit for the maximum number of rows returned

You made here an important assumption

> someone who already knows a programming language

I'm sure someone who can already code, can write a simple query. But my argument is

1. with AI assistance programmer would be quicker, with less friction, more productive, enabled to make queries beyond his current abilities

2. with AI assistance Non-programmer would be enabled to use SQL at all

3. real world queries are often not trivial (todays developers have simple queries covered by ORM / query building tools)

Regarding real life queries - I look at my last query that I crafted with difficulty and AI help - starts `WITH RECURSIVE`, uses `UNION ALL`, `GROUP_CONCAT`, `COALESCE` (even with SELECT statement inside), multiple CTEs. It would take me hours to get to that. I can have that in minutes with AI help. I don't even mention different dialects, feature support, arrays and JSONs, extensions, etc.