I can describe how Django addresses the issues that you raise:

1. You can squash the migrations, or delete them all and start afresh. I have had to do this just once on a project after it was 4 years old, and it was easy to do (ie. it is relatively infrequent).

2. You can experiment by creating new migrations, and, when you’re done, rollback and create the one you want.

The third point I cannot address, as you were very much using Python/Django and I cannot imagine an easy way to use the database models cross-project. I would probably argue that you shouldn’t do this.

However, Django’s approach was largely declarative, but in Python not SQL. Further, the migrations were automatically generated as Python which made them easy to modify.