Technically ActiveRecord uses Arel, which in turn compiles, if you will, to SQL. Arel (a strict subset of) could theoretically be an alternative to SQL, if databases supported it as a native language. They don't, so the SQL step is a practical requirement.

This is similar to the browser (especially in the pre-WASM days). No matter what language you actually wrote your software in, eventually you were going to end up converting it to Javascript out of necessity. Would you still say that your program written in C, compiled with emscripten, was written in Javascript?