And I don't think any educated engineer expects an RDB to perform better than a KV, that's the whole point, I don't have a key, I need to query the data within the rows. These basics are taught in 200 level data structures courses that every undergrad in a CS or CPE degree must understand.

In my testing of dotnet, the EF Core framework averaged faster response times at every query I passed to it compared to hand compiled SQL queries for my use cases. Optimized stored procedures were the only performance benefit when requesting rows with primary keys (which is basically never). After the queries are cached in efcore, the performance is as good or better 99% of the time for my use cases, which is also the general consensus around most ORMs. And beyond this caching is used, where cache optimized KV stores blow the doors of KV databases, so I get the best of both.