If you're encountering these problems at scale where scale is up to the reader, I can promise you that you're already writing SQL. You might have already started from the beginning by writing direct SQL, because that's something that rails also allows you to do against a model. Apart from juniors, I don't think I've ever met anyone who actually said that they wanted to avoid writing SQL in all cases. The reality is that it's far more useful and efficient to burn cpu time than dev time, and ORMs general tend towards the latter than the former in the favor of generally being a fair bit more legible (depending on the writer).
As a semi-counter-point, learning some data mapper libraries where you learn a DSL that seems better-structured than SQL definitely helped me understand SQL better.
SQL is ultimately a bit dysfunctional and takes a lot of getting used to. Not arguing it's worth learning but since most of my career I was not truly exposed to it, I preferred the bespoke DSL.
I'll agree using ORMs is indeed going to ridiculous lengths to avoid learning even a smidgen of SQL but there's a nice middle ground.