some thoughts about Exposed on Reddit (not my post): https://www.reddit.com/r/Kotlin/comments/qqp87z/thoughts_aloud_about_exposed/

Responded with some defence... I am finding Exposed simple and productive to use; OP's claim that it's 'badly designed' seems entirely based on its support for an implicit database connection in transactions (and their misunderstanding that this is optional). I must admit I don't care much for the implicit connection; it's more misleading than it is helpful, but that's hardly a basis to shoot down Exposed in general.

Despite these issues, I found Exposed was the best, maintained library of it's kind... I tried Ktorm (which lacks schema generating -- which I need for test setup, and doesn't seem to be actively developed), sql delight (which forces you to write sqls and ddls...), and even Kotsya (which requires explicitly telling it what db implementation being used for tables, making it harder to frequently test with h2, and real implementations more rarely...). And Squash was updated last 3 years ago..