so theoretically, making the .select() api more "user friendly" on the supabase side of things is possible?

Potentially yes, but making it more user friendly would likely be challenging. I think the docs could definitely be a bit more straightforwards, but there's always got to be a balance between providing a good number of examples and not providing too many. Truth be told, I'm not a huge fan of it for this reason and I tend to opt for creating Postgres functions if I need to match data across tables like this. In my eyes, it's not verbose enough, and I genuinely struggle to understand most of these nested queries we see in Postgrest. Compare that with Postgres functions, I can clearly see what's going on what what references are being queried. Using Prisma or Sequelize is definitely another option, but then you'd have to handle auth and realtime with the library instead which could make code difficult to follow.

Yea that makes a lot of sense. Unfortunately I'm pretty terrible at Postgres/SQL type language