> There are lighter weight options that do basic stuff like transaction management and binding result sets to object properties that are much less of a PITA than ORMs.

Query builders like these are my personal favorite from a productivity perspective! The point of a query builder is to dynamically build SQL statements that have many subtle variations (do we want to filter by EmailID or PhoneID here? What about a subquery? Did the caller want all results, or just results where $field=X?). They're basically one level above string templating for SQL generation, and often have niceties around ser/de and transaction management as you mentioned.

Because they are primarily about query generation, it feels _very_ natural to pop off the hood and write raw queries directly when necessary. You can usually use the transaction management and ser/de parts with raw queries, too.

My personal favorite in this field is knex.js.