What do you think stored procedures are written in if not code? Some of them are written in even C++ (I've done plenty myself).
I understand the sentiment but there is not anything inherently wrong with a stored procedure. If they came out today we'd probably call it edge computing.
It is actually the exact same level of effort as code as it is code.
If you mean stored procedures are harder to test than something like ORM in Django than that is just a huge misunderstanding of how you properly write stored procedures while also not understanding how hard it is to actually test a lot of ORM logic.
Wayyyy back in the day, after the dotcom crash, I got moved from a SWE role in my company to the consulting (customer implementation) side to try to bring more rigor to their process. One of the first things I did was replace a several thousand line stored procedure full of pivots, transforms, cursors, etc. with a few hundred lines of code. As a bonus, performance improved by a couple orders of magnitude as well.
Knowing what to process in memory, what to delegate to the database, to the datawarehouses, or other heavyweight data-processing engines like Spark, is its own subfield, data engineering.
Finding data engineers that can actually do it will become difficult in just a bit, as there's a goldrush to take on that role, and lots of people want in with some rudimentary knowledge of SQL and Python.
Anyway, I'm always suspicious of people advocating for stored procedures, because those are version controlled if you're lucky, and I've yet to see them subject to automated testing.
What I'm suspicious is that, having seen untested stored procedures, you haven't bothered to try unit test them. I mean, you can do a lot with BEGIN; set db in good state; call procedure; ROLLBACK; but you have to try.