[cnity]

So many people say this, but I have to imagine that such people haven't actually really tried to write SQL in their services and avoid the temptation to introduce all sorts of abstractions.

Because in my experience this doesn't happen. You just have to be OK with some duplication (which most engineers over-focus on to the point of serious detriment).

[zzzeek]

In my experience I did what you describe above for about ten years then I wrote SQLAlchemy, tired of writing the same code over and over again (and successive projects certainly gained more and more abstraction as the constant repetition became more obviously a huge waste of time and verbosity). So that's one example.