Of course, the long term dream would be to generate type definitions from the SQL files, but I assume that would require a heck of a lot of magic (e.g. "actually run a query, figure out what the schema of the result table is, and create a snapshot of that"). I haven't seen a lot of prior art in terms of "static typing of DB access without a big ol' ORM,"

Regarding GraphQL, a combination of something like Postgraphile[0] and graphql-code-generator[1] or graphqlgen[2] gets you pretty much there without writing a single line of code.

[0] https://www.graphile.org/ [1] https://github.com/dotansimha/graphql-code-generator [2] https://oss.prisma.io/graphqlgen/