When I started my dev career in the early aughts, by no particular plan, ended up down the route of a DBA after doing a few Access to MSSQL migrations. Wrote some really gnarly SQL sprocs back in those days.
In those early days, ORMs were really bad and didn't feel very ergonomic to use.
But the tooling has come such a long way. Today, ORMs are generally pretty competent for 80-90% of the use cases I would find in a typical business app. Microsoft's Entity Framework always seems to surprise me when I find that I can do fairly complicated queries and have it generate almost perfect SQL. It's migrations are pretty good to the extent that it's rare to have to manually amend its migrations. Even though I think I'm quite good at hand rolling SQL, EF Core just makes it far more productive to work at the application layer instead.
I think the biggest hurdle to SQL today is that the DBA is a dying breed and SQL hasn't really had a "revolution" to meet the (sometimes perceived) needs of younger teams. For example, scaling relational database still requires more forethought and each approach comes with some limitations and gotchas. On the other hand, the rise of NoSQL databases and JavaScript in the application stack means that document-oriented databases like Firestore and CosmosDB are perhaps easier for teams to adopt, even with the limitations, because infrastructure concerns (scaling, replication, etc.) disappear.
In those early days, ORMs were really bad and didn't feel very ergonomic to use.
But the tooling has come such a long way. Today, ORMs are generally pretty competent for 80-90% of the use cases I would find in a typical business app. Microsoft's Entity Framework always seems to surprise me when I find that I can do fairly complicated queries and have it generate almost perfect SQL. It's migrations are pretty good to the extent that it's rare to have to manually amend its migrations. Even though I think I'm quite good at hand rolling SQL, EF Core just makes it far more productive to work at the application layer instead.
I think the biggest hurdle to SQL today is that the DBA is a dying breed and SQL hasn't really had a "revolution" to meet the (sometimes perceived) needs of younger teams. For example, scaling relational database still requires more forethought and each approach comes with some limitations and gotchas. On the other hand, the rise of NoSQL databases and JavaScript in the application stack means that document-oriented databases like Firestore and CosmosDB are perhaps easier for teams to adopt, even with the limitations, because infrastructure concerns (scaling, replication, etc.) disappear.