I've also been following Kysely and am a big fan, having used Objection.js and Knex a lot in the past. I consider Kysely to be the TypeScript-native spiritual successor to Knex.
For a theoretical new Node + TypeScript + SQL project, the three options I would consider are, from most-ORMy to least:
- Prisma
- Kysely + kysely-codegen (query builder)
- slonik + @slonik/typegen (raw postgres driver with good types; not sure if there's a good MySQL equivalent)