Yup, Eloquent from Laravel which I think is the part that kinda made me insist it can be done the way I want. Since there is the groupBy method for the ORM but also groupBy for result object. The groupBy on the result object does exactly what I showed and keys the results accordingly, where as the groupBy on the ORM or query builder is an interface for the SQL engines methods and in POSTGRES you have to have all columns from the select available in the groupBy + then any aggregates you use can be excluded so counting etc works but if I wanted all the data the best is to use the result and instead groupBy in my code to build the structure I want.