At the other side of the fence we have JS/TS experts writing inscrutable one-liners by chaining 15 lodash commands.
Having tried both SQL and the approach of using a programming language + framework of the day, I prefer SQL for data manipulation. It's far easier to troubleshoot, scale, hand-over or maintain in the long run.
I've also been looking for that. In an ideal world there would be a small, fast, standalone cli tool that can convert csv to parquet. There is a (sadly, unfinished) parquet writer Rust library in the Arrow repository that looks promising. All approaches I've tried so far (spark, pyarrow, drill, ...) require everything and the kitchen sink. So far I've settled on a java cli tool that uses jackson + org.apache.parquet internally, but it's cpu bound and has a huge amount of maven dependencies.