> I'm thinking the best approach if I had time/money would be to develop a better query language that is close enough to SQL for people to learn, but then also translates back down to SQL
Have a look at EdgeQL, the query language that powers edgedb.
Too many folks' livelihoods depend on it at this point. The other side of the same coin is the gaslighting that you can't build anything sufficiently complex without react. If you did build it without react, it obviously wasn't sufficiently complex.
> "As they stare into the mirror and perceive only the myth of their exceptionalism, Americans remain almost bizarrely incapable of seeing what has actually become of their country."
France also has online.net (now Scaleway?) which I haven't used recently but was very good and reliable for me 3 years ago. Been using Hetzner ever since, which has set the new bar.