While there is a compelling case for leveraging the full power of Postgres (especially features like SKIP LOCKED and pg_notify), this approach feels like a classic trade-off between fine-grained control and long-term maintainability.

Relying solely on raw SQL and manual mapping certainly eliminates "ORM magic," but it replaces it with a significant maintenance burden.

For specialized, high-performance systems like video transcoding, this level of hand-tuning is a superpower; however, for the average CRUD-heavy SaaS app, the "boilerplate tax" of writing eighty lines of repository code for a simple related insert might eventually cost more in development velocity than the performance gains are worth.