> Wouldn't it help to have a language for working with it that isn't outright terrible?
There is a language like that, and it's downright elegant. It's called LINQ, and it's built into the C# language. It inverts FROM and SELECT, which lets it reliably support autocomplete. LINQ was built using concepts from category theory/relational theory and is widely used in C# to make code tighter and simpler (even though some eschew it because simple for loops are faster). It also transpiles to SQL via Linq-to-SQL. It looks like this:
var results = from c in collection
where c.Fld1
It's the closest thing we have to SQL that Typescript is to Javascript.
That said, most people who access databases in C# still either write SQL or use an ORM like EF or Dapper.
Databases speak SQL natively for better or for worse. And the SQL language, despite its flaws, is actually mathematically very deep because it's been developed and extended over so many years. See [2] for some serious SQL-fu. To replicate all this functionality into a new language that transpiles into performant SQL is a huge undertaking.
SQL is one of those incumbents that is extremely hard to displace, partly because it's so ubiquitous and that in practice, not everyone finds outright terrible.
True, it's not good, but it's not terrible. I write it day in and day out. The analogy I can think of is the Erlang language -- it doesn't have a pretty syntax but it solves the concurrency problem really well. SQL for better or for worse solves the complex analytic query problem really well.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_Integrated_Query
[2] https://modern-sql.com/slides