I'm curious if you have tried SeaORM? I've used it a little bit (not too extensively) and really like it. It's like sqlalchemy in that you can declare your tables and have a type checked query builder, which is a big win IMO. It's nice to add/change a field and have the compiler tell you everywhere you need to fix things.

I've definitely had issues when using sqlalchemy where some REST API type returns an ORM object that ends up performing many queries to pull in a bunch of unnecessary data. I think this is harder to do accidentally with SeaORM because the Rust type system makes hiding queries and connections harder.

Most of my usage of SeaORM has been as a type query builder, which is really what I want from an ORM. I don't want to have to deal with lining my "?" or "$1" binds or manually manipulate strings to build a query. IMO a good query builder moves the experience closer to writing actual SQL, without a query builder I find myself writing "scripts" to write SQL.