I always disliked ActiveRecord, but I figured ORMs don't have to be ActiveRecord. I created this library 14(!) years ago not too long before this article was written https://github.com/iaindooley/PluSQL

The idea is that you like SQL, but it gets repetitive writing joins and accessor code. I had always hoped it would catch on as a pattern: no boilerplate, automatic mapping to objects in your code of any query (whether generated by the ORM or passed in as a raw query) and easy to override/dynamically build bits of the query as you pass the object around.