EdgeQL looks really nice. I do think this will be somewhat hard to sell because at small scales SQL and basic ORMs mostly work and have less lock-in. At large scales folks also want a lot more operational features like scaling out, control of the underlying schema for performance reasons, relaxing some constraints for horizontal sharding, and so on.

I think EdgeQL (and the data model) has potential for being a lot more than accessing the database. For example, you could have a distributed system use this data model across various typically replicated data stores - include all caches and "materialized views" of various kinds. Extend EdgeQL to define various caches and computed values from the core schema. Then you could use it to represent querying the same data but with different freshness. Now this becomes a compelling idea. Essentially it gives you a well defined way to declare and manage various computed values, laggy caches without having to manually implement all that coordination.