Check out Kysley: https://kysely.dev/
Query builders are nice, but they sometimes end up in this middle ground where they have the worst parts of an ORM (needing to learn a new syntax and not getting access to all the DB features) and the worst parts of raw SQL (Unpacking relationships into objects w/ pointers is error prone boilerplate that sucks to write).
I love SqlAlchemy since it's still enough of an ORM to solve the main problem I want solved. Super curious to hear if you've had good experiences with Keysley and how it deals with transforming relationships into objects