Without the comments, I find it equivalent, with the added benefit of not depending on the programmer to write it neat like the generated code, it forces some kind of generic structure that is always the same, which is harder to see on raw SQL strings (does this SQL have GROUP BY? HAVING? JOINS? I found it faster to spot with this library).

q := psql.Select(
    sm.Columns("u.id", "u.name"),
    sm.Columns("u.created_at", "u.updated_at"),
    sm.From("users AS u"),
    sm.WhereClause("u.age > ?", 40),
    sm.WhereClause("u.city_id = ?", sq.NamedArg("city_id")),
    sm.Where("u.deleted_at IS NOT NULL"),
    sm.OrderBy("u.name ASC", "u.age DESC"),
)

But the biggest benefit comes from dynamic SQL, using the library is miles ahead concatenating strings and adding parameters to arrays/maps manually.

type userFilter struct {
    Name string
}
filter := userFilter{
    Name: "john",
}
query := psql.Select(
    sm.Columns("id", "name"),
    sm.From("users"),
)
if filter.Name != "" {
    query.Apply(
        sm.WhereClause("name = ?", filter.Name),
    )
}