When I used prisma a few years ago I was not impressed and it couldn't do a lot of what I needed so I had to dump into raw sql queries anyway. It was easier for me to use knex and get the types mostly right.
A lot has changed in the past years of Prisma, it's a really great tool, to be honest, "raw sql" escape hatches to do anything raw when you need it, if you haven't tried it in years, I'd recommend you to try again since if you tried it years ago, it was a very different maturity level.
I believe the sidecar is optional now, and I think even the one that exists comes in the form of their paid service called Prisma Proxy. It doesn’t seem necessary for most use cases.
You should take a look at ts-sql-query [1] - it is not as popular as the older alternatives that have been around for a while, but it is a very feature rich query builder that takes type safety very seriously and supports most mainstream databases.