"Correct technological choice": I think relational algebra style APIs (a la Polars) are the "correct technological choice" here. SQL is just a tool to express relational algebra, and I'm not sure it's a good one.
I personally love any of the IDEA platform products, such as IntelliJ Ultimate, DataGrip, and also DataSpell.
For strictly analysis, I’d recommend DataSpell as it’s more oriented towards that. Additionally, it has built in functionality to do sql queries in notebook cells and will save to a variable which is a data frame.
"Correct technological choice": I think relational algebra style APIs (a la Polars) are the "correct technological choice" here. SQL is just a tool to express relational algebra, and I'm not sure it's a good one.