Remember back in the day ... raw SQL. All the children in unison say, "Woah"!

There is no avoiding the database part: model module, alembic migrations, static type checking, UDF, UDF rtyping, string PRAGMAs/SET|SHOW. And a beautiful config file to link them all!

Database work is very time consuming.

have to reevaluate if async is that important to me or not.

Why would be concerning yourself about that? Should have both [a]sync support throughout. Discussing this shouldn't even be a topic it should be the norm.