How else will you support CloudKit with SQLite? Personally CloudKit is a requirement as my customers value having their personal data inside their own Apple account rather than storing it on my servers. I also rely on CloudKit to avoid the cost and on-call burden of operating a realtime sync service.

Re: ORM, the SwiftData-like ORM part of SQLiteData is actually completely optional. You can write SQL statements directly via #sql: https://swiftpackageindex.com/pointfreeco/swift-structured-q... You can wrap usage of this in your own method so that you can swap out SQLiteData in the future without lock-in.

Re: Swift types, you may roll your own mapping, but performance is not trivial. Here is a benchmark from SQLiteData:

Orders.fetchAll setup rampup duration

   SQLite (generated by Enlighter 1.4.10) 0        0.144    7.183

   Lighter (1.4.10)                       0        0.164    8.059

   SQLiteData (1.0.0)                     0        0.172    8.511

   GRDB (7.4.1, manual decoding)          0        0.376    18.819

   SQLite.swift (0.15.3, manual decoding) 0        0.564    27.994

   SQLite.swift (0.15.3, Codable)         0        0.863    43.261

   GRDB (7.4.1, Codable)                  0.002    1.07     53.326