There are plenty of devs out there perfectly capable of writing sql (and plenty of DBAs who are actually just developers). It's not rocket science and is entirely based in CS.

Sounds like you should face your fears and learn SQL if you think it's so arcane that somebody else needs to write every and all queries for you. It's not as hard as you think.

Though there are certainly cases where it helps to be able to find someone more experienced and knowledgable than you.

Or perhaps you're a DBA that's tooting your horn so loudly that you don't believe anyone can do what you do.

So wrong.

I thought this thinking was 10 years dead at this point.

That ... depends where you work. Some places (I've, uh, heard, yes) have DBAs that won't let the devs touch the database and either enforce ORM usage or vet every query before allowing it to release.

And, to be fair, having seen some of the abominations people have committed with SQL, I only half blame them.

Well, it's simply an organizational decision that a company is making at a certain scale. Division of labor and expertise. Fair enough.

But the issue is with saying "no developer should be writing SQL strings, ever".

It's like saying "no designer can handle HTML, leave that to the professionals".