Just use an ORM or any other kind of library that removes the boilerplate and is 100x more maintainable and productive.
See how useful it is to not explain anything.
Far easier to write correct sql than to convince the orm how to form correct sql.
For smaller systems it might be ok I guess, but stay alive long enough and you 'll see that sooner or later every small system desires to grow, grow and grow!
good ORMs all have a way to fine-control the underlying statements to avoid querying individual rows one by one.
I'm fairly proficient with sql queries and i still don't like writing sql queries and binding to objects manually
No, that makes no sense.
If you have to investigate 2 places where performance issues have cropped up and hand-write the SQL in those places, while 95% of your application works just fine, how did you lose all the benefits?
My SQL competency was fine from the beginning, thank you very much.
However, your comparison does not make sense. JOOQ and similar libraries don't make you write SQL, even if their API is closer to SQL than what most ORMs do.
If you replace "ORM" in your example with NoSQL or some other technology that directly competes with SQL then it would make sense.
Just my experience so far.