Totally agree! The wave of blog posts and examples one sees where it's just text-to-SQL or text-to-Cypher or any other query lang aren't really exploring the topic at any level of technical depth, and we need to see more evaluations and technical papers that characterize them, so that we can understand how to build better systems.
I think even on the LLMS + KGs space the depth is not very deep. In fact there is more technical depth in the text-to-SQL than anything else I have seen on LLMs. Maybe the COLBERT-like matrix-models is another topic where there is good technical depth.