I used to work bit with MongoDB (over 10 years ago) and it did wonders in making me fall back into love with relational databases. I finally saw the light of Codd!
SQL, as a language is clunky, true. It can be patched here are there, either by PipeSQL or by various ORMs. I agree, that it would be wonderful to have standardized tooling for generating JSON like in the post.
Yet, with relational databased you can separate concerns of: what is your data and what you want to display. If you use JSON-like way to store data, it can do the job until you want to change data or queries.
SQL, as a language is clunky, true. It can be patched here are there, either by PipeSQL or by various ORMs. I agree, that it would be wonderful to have standardized tooling for generating JSON like in the post.
Yet, with relational databased you can separate concerns of: what is your data and what you want to display. If you use JSON-like way to store data, it can do the job until you want to change data or queries.