That's fair... I do typically have a layer that sits at the level of an ORM, whose purpose is to reduce boilerplate and handle/verify types.

So I can't really claim I have nothing at the ORM level... However...

In my experience, when you pull in an off-the-shelf ORM and an off-the-shelf RPC framework you end up building app-level wrappers anyway to deal with the complexity and impedance mismatch between what you want your app to use for data access code and what layer provides.

So I think you might as well put your app-level database wrapper as directly around the database as you can manage (that probably means using the common, unopinionated client for your db... e.g., node-postgres for server-side javascript and postgres, or whatever the equivalent is for your backend/database).