Approach 2 - Using Knex Raw Bindings https://knexjs.org/#Raw

Knex can let you write a raw SQL statement, providing the parameters separately and it builds the actual resulting SQL string, ensuring that everything is escaped properly.

knex.raw('select * from users where id = ?', [1])

we could build an approach around this, which would allow users to still write something closer to plain SQL (no need to learn a new library?) and still put some safeguards to protect against injection.