Yep. The ORM situation in JS is not great. There’s no one go-to, and it seems like the question often prompts a patronizing response about how ORMs aren't really necessary. Kysely is really great, but it’s not an ORM.

My take: the JS ecosystem tends to avoid abstraction for whatever reason. Example: they don’t believe that their web framework should transparently validate that the form submission has the correct shape because that’s too magical. Instead the Right Way is to learn a DSL (such as Zod) to describe the shape of the input, then manually write the code to check it. Every single time. Oh and you can’t write a TS type to do that because Reasons. It all comes off as willful ignorance of literally a decade or more of established platforms such as Rails/Spring/ASP.NET. All they had to do was steal the good ideas. But I suspect the cardinal sin of those frameworks was that they were no longer cool.

I have a hard time relaying this without sounding too negative. I tried to get into SSR webdev with TS and kept an open mind about it. But the necessary ingredients for me weren’t there. It’s a shame because Vite is such a pleasure to develop with.