Looking back, I actually quite liked it - you had conditionals and ability to build queries dynamically (including snippets, doing loops etc.), while still writing mostly SQL with a bit of XML DSL around it, which didn't suck as much as one might imagine. The only problem was that there was still writing some boilerplate, which I wasn't the biggest fan of.
Hibernate always felt like walking across a bridge that might collapse at any moment (one eager fetch away from killing the performance, or having some obscure issue related to the entity mappings), however I liked tooling that let you point towards your database and get a local set of entities mapped automatically, even though codegen also used to have some issues occasionally (e.g. date types).
That said, there's also projects like jOOQ which had a more code centric approach, although I recall it being slightly awkward to use in practice: https://www.jooq.org/ (and the autocomplete killed the performance in some IDEs because of all the possible method signatures)
More recently, when working on a Java project, I opted for JDBI3, which felt reasonably close to what you're describing, at the expense of not being able to build dynamic queries as easily as it was with myBatis: https://jdbi.org/
I don't think there's a silver bullet out there, everything from lightweight ORMs, to heavy ORMs like Hibernate, or even writing pure SQL has drawbacks. You just have to make the tradeoffs that will see you being successful in your particular project.
Can't vouch enough for MyBatis, using it since forever and it never let me down, or produced any sort of frustration.
It strikes the perfect balance: on code level, you still work with domain objects and the db access sublimates away into single lines of code (select, update, ...), but they are backed by handcrafted queries that can leverage the full potential of the db. What MyBatis does is mapping from an arbitrary result set to your domain object, and it's _really smart_ about it (it knows how to convert most data types and perform arbitrary level of recursion/nesting of objects, or return collections). For all those things that it can't possibly do (like intermediary JSON conversions or things like that) you have an handy TypeHandler abstraction, that you can tuck away in a dedicated package for autodiscovery and doesn't pollute your code or queries.
Also, you pay only 3% over raw JDBC in the average case.
If you love MyBatis please donate: it can't go away.
Have you ever looked at something like myBatis? In particular, the XML mappers: https://mybatis.org/mybatis-3/dynamic-sql.html
Looking back, I actually quite liked it - you had conditionals and ability to build queries dynamically (including snippets, doing loops etc.), while still writing mostly SQL with a bit of XML DSL around it, which didn't suck as much as one might imagine. The only problem was that there was still writing some boilerplate, which I wasn't the biggest fan of.
Hibernate always felt like walking across a bridge that might collapse at any moment (one eager fetch away from killing the performance, or having some obscure issue related to the entity mappings), however I liked tooling that let you point towards your database and get a local set of entities mapped automatically, even though codegen also used to have some issues occasionally (e.g. date types).
That said, there's also projects like jOOQ which had a more code centric approach, although I recall it being slightly awkward to use in practice: https://www.jooq.org/ (and the autocomplete killed the performance in some IDEs because of all the possible method signatures)
More recently, when working on a Java project, I opted for JDBI3, which felt reasonably close to what you're describing, at the expense of not being able to build dynamic queries as easily as it was with myBatis: https://jdbi.org/
With the multi-line string support we have in Java now, it was rather pleasant regardless: https://blog.kronis.dev/tutorials/2-4-pidgeot-a-system-for-m...
I don't think there's a silver bullet out there, everything from lightweight ORMs, to heavy ORMs like Hibernate, or even writing pure SQL has drawbacks. You just have to make the tradeoffs that will see you being successful in your particular project.