sqldef is really cool for supporting many database dialects. I'm the author of Skeema [1] which includes a lot of functionality that sqldef lacks, but at the cost of being 100% MySQL/MariaDB-specific. Some other DB-specific options in this space include Stripe's pg-schema-diff [2], results [3], stb-tester's migrator for sqlite [4], among many others over the years.
The more comprehensive solutions from ByteBase, Atlas, Liquibase, etc tend to support multiple databases and multiple paradigms.
And then over in Typescript ORM world, the migrators in Prisma and Drizzle support a "db push" declarative concept. (fwiw, I originated that paradigm; Prisma directly copied several aspects of `skeema push`, and then Drizzle copied Prisma. But ironically, if I ever complete my early-stage next-gen tool, it uses a different deployment paradigm.)
[1] https://github.com/skeema/skeema/
[2] https://github.com/stripe/pg-schema-diff
[3] https://github.com/djrobstep/results
[4] https://david.rothlis.net/declarative-schema-migration-for-s...
Personally I've called it a mistake, since there's no way a tool can infer what happened based on that information.
That might sound like a major caveat, but many companies either ban renames or have a special "out-of-band" process for them anyway, once a table is being used in production. This is necessary because renames have substantial deploy-order complexity, i.e. you cannot make the schema change at the same exact instant as the corresponding application change, and the vast majority of ORMs don't provide anything to make this sane.
In any case, many thousands of companies use declarative schema management. Some of the largest companies on earth use it. It is known to work, and when engineered properly, it definitely improves development velocity.
Small things where you don’t have DBA or whatever, sure use tooling like you would for auto-changes in a local development.