I think there are probably a million posts and papers talking about text to SQL as it's a problem that's been tackled for a long time now...just with more vigor

I think there are probably a million posts and papers talking about text to SQL as it's a problem that's been tackled for a long time now...just with more vigor recently now that LLMs provide an improved/shiny approach. I think many companies now offer or consider themselves semantic layers in some fashion (google "semantic layer" + tableau, cube.dev, dbt...). I have not come across any blog or paper comparing text-to-sql directly to text-semantic-api. Certainly the latter is not as flexible as the former in that it can't produce every possible SQL query. In practice (for me at least) that's often not necessary, or is necessary rarely so you just do your direct SQL as needed and use your semantic layer >95% of the time.