Other ORMs separate building the query from executing the query, which is less ergonomic but more explicit. Drawing on Rust, https://diesel.rs/ shows how this approach would work:

    users.select(count_star()).first(&connection)

which is really just a cleaned-up version of your suggestion.

Of course, you could imagine an ActiveRecord-like API to make this nicer:

    User.first{|t| t.count}
    User.first{|t| t.count}.execute!
    User.execute{|t| t.count}.values.first
    # ...etc.

but the underlying problem is that building the query and executing the query are two discrete steps, Rails streamlines them instead of making the separation obvious, and when a system hides complexity it becomes harder to know what it's really doing.