This problem is associated with ORMs but the moment there's a get_user(id) function which does a select and you need to display a list of users someone will run it in a loop to generate the list and it will look like it's working until the user list gets long.

I really wish there was a way to compose SQL so you can actually write the dumb/obvious thing and it will run a single query. I talked with a dev once who seemed to have the beginnings of a system that could do this. It leveraged async and put composable queryish objects into a queue and kept track of what what callers needed what results, merged and executed the single query, and then returned the results. Obviously far from generalizable for arbitrary queries but it did seem to work.