In my experience most SQL developers don't care too much about tooling. In most cases someone designs the database and tables, developers don't care about databases and care mostly about tables and views, rarely about indexes. The ones that care, and need tooling, are usually called development DBAs and they are very rare. Rare enough I was never able to hire one and keep them (we don't pay enough for how rare they are).
I've been in that camp for much of my career, and yes, tooling matters.
As you suggest however, tooling for that workload is pretty rare. I want something that focuses on enhancing the database development experience: that understands that there are development workflows for database code which are well controlled and rigorous. So many database tools are focused on being system administrative aids first, or giving you features for directly interacting and <ack> altering the running state of the database and its server from the tool.
The best tool I found for what I do was targeted at Oracle: Allround Automation's PL/SQL Developer (https://www.allroundautomations.com/products/pl-sql-develope...). It's a development oriented tool that, at least last I used it, was focused on serious development work rather than administrative work. Now, I haven't used it in almost 20 years when last I did Oracle development... but I haven't found anything for PostgreSQL that has that thoughtfully implemented database developer centric feature set.
Today I muddle through with DataGrip. DataGrip has just enough of what I need that it's marginally better to work with than just a simple text editor... and also narrowly avoids some misfeatures as not to negate it's utility.
All true.
I loved workgroup style app development. R:Base, Access, dBase, FoxPro. Then I switched to UI work for a stretch.
Circling back to back-end work, naive me embraced Hibernate (2004?), assuming it'd be familiar and good.
I was wrong.
Now that I have a lot of free time, I'm finally recreating the workgroup style experience, for the general dev population. Sort of.
Using Hibernate, our workflow became: rough in some ORM hack, capture the generated SQL, use SQL Query Analyzer and Toad to make it work (and performant), coerce Hibernate to regenerate the SQL we want. Totally backwards, right?
Eventually we gave up and just used HQL.
At that point, why even bother with ORM?
So I created a "SQL first" workflow. Treat your SQL (DML) as source code, use those explicit queries to generate the prepared statements (and typesafe DAOs, DTOs, etc). In other words, auto-generate all the things you'd do yourself, if only you had more time.
I used my tool for years. Am currently making it usable for other devs. eg Spent last week making my grammar for MySQL "good enough" for initial release. Already have PostgreSQL and SQLite, plus my original turrible "poor mans SQL" grammar (comparable SQL-92). Which I'll cull once I have "good enough" T-SQL and PL/SQL grammars.
Any way. Thanks for reading.
I only meant to confirm your experience with development DBAs. The only such person I was able to retain was near retirement and was tired of the hustle.