Like I said, you're either using an existing ORM or just writing your own everytime, and the one you write probably won't be very good as seen by the numerous security and performance bugs that are constantly found. Also abstractions are useful. All of software development is built with abstractions and they don't suddenly become useless when it comes to databases.
I also don't see what this has to do with API clients or build steps, but there are good and bad examples of those too.
