SQL: A Bad Wrap?

REST and GraphQL have a bad wrap is there's this draconian approach that you have to do the absolute. I very much like the idea that yeah if you need to migrate your database you can literally just read each row in change the value update the column write it back out. It would be a little unintuitive that name would might map to name five but I think that that's a very acceptable trade-off when you consider all the complexities that could happen.