I think the criticisms of the article are basically right. SQL sucks in a lot of ways, and the base SQL standard really sucks such that virtually everyone has extended it at least somewhat, but they've all done it in a completely nonstandard way so nothing is portable, and the standard is never officially updated anymore. Oh also it's a massively leaky abstraction and you may have to tune your query to the database anyway, like even just normally, not even something ported, hence hints/etc.

There are quite a lot of pretty basic things many programmers would want to do that just are way more stupid than they should be. One that irks me is things like "return me the top 100 items", "return me/join against the most event for item X in a history log", etc) that end up requiring way more shit than they should just because there's no standards-compliant way to say "select first X rows from ... where ... order by ..." or "join first row where .. order by ...". In the case of top 100 you just wrap it in another query, but for more analytical stuff like "join the most recent X for this item" you have to use window functions and the syntax fucking sucks.

Since you mention optimization, perhaps it would help to allow the abstraction to be peeled away and write clauses that express imperative commands. Like being able to write that what you want is an "index join table X on index Y", etc. That's sorta what hints do, but roll them into the language in a portable way. It could also allow the query planner to look at it and tell you "that's just not possible and you need to check your keys/indexes/queries/etc", rather than having to run it and guess what it's trying to do.

Because I kinda feel that's a lot of the tension for SQL queries (beyond the QOL stuff that everyone knows is stupid). It's a guessing game. You're trying to write queries that will be planned well, but the query planner is not a simple thing that you can easily predict. The closest analogy is probably something like OpenGL/DirectX where you're just guessing at what behaviors might trigger some given heuristic in the driver and there are a lot of unseen weights and flags. There are "equivalent" SQL expressions that are much heavier than another seemingly similar one (like "select from ... join ... where exists (select ...)" vs "select where x in (select ...)". There are operations that are mysteriously expensive because you're missing an index or the query isn't getting planned the way you expect.

The suggestion of a "procedural" expression is, I think, also probably correct for some situations. PL/SQL functions are extremely useful, just obnoxious and in some cases arcane to write (as someone who never had formal education in DBA). It would be even nicer if you could have an embedded Python-style thing that let you have "python" syntax with iteration and list comprehensions and shit, that represent DB queries using cursors and shit, and perhaps defer execution until some final "execute" command while transforming it all into a SQL query. Like C#'s LINQ but for Python, but instead of buffering streams of objects transform it into a database query. Transform operations/etc on fields into SQL statements that work on columns, etc.

Or java if you will. Imagine a Java Streams API that compiles down to planner ops. I know Hibernate Criteria and JPA exists, but skip that API and express it as streams: iterations and transforms and so on, and map that onto the DB. Being able to build subqueries, then attach them to larger queries, etc. That way they execute in bytecode rather than pl/java.