Good point. We had great success doing this with our PHP code base. For us it wasn't about pretty or not-pretty code, but rather about type safety. The idea that you can have a method which accepts "WhereClause $constraints" instead of "string $constraints" means you can be much more confident that the code is correct.

We actually wrote a custom query builder because none of the available ones (e.g. Doctrine) had the type safety that we desired. A direct parallel to what we used is the Java library JOOQ, in terms of its querybuilder API [0].

[0] https://www.jooq.org/doc/3.10/manual/sql-building/sql-statem...

Same here, we use Knex.js Querybuilder to build queries and fallback to `knex.raw()` for very specific SQL queries.

Ah, coincidence... Knex is the one I've been using too :-)