> I think ORMs fit that bill. For some reason they were (are?) incredibly popular, but I don't think they stood the test of time.

I don't think there is any truth at all to this personal belief. In some domains it's unthinkable to use anything other than the standard ORM. In C# you'd need to be nuts to roll SQL by hand instead of using Entity Framework, and Django speaks for itself.

The only drawback of ORMs is that their promise is that developers don't need to learn the intricacies of SQL and SQL-related design patterns, but in practice developers need to learn the intricacies of SQL, the ORM framework, and the SQL generated by the ORM. Naive developers might believe they are better off reinventing the wheel with ad-hoc SQL stuff, but that's another problem.