No, you can use tc commands directly to achieve this (then again sqm-scripts really mostly are a convenience layer around the necessary tc invocations...)
There are also other projects like qos-scripts, qosify, cake-qos-simple that can be used to achieve the same.
And there are no limits really, so you could also deploy libreqos in a bump-in-the-wire configuration, or rent a VPS server in the cloud to do all the ingress shaping on and then tunnel to your router, or...
In my biased opinion sqm-scripts will make it easy getting started (not that qosify or cake-qos-simple are more complicated) and you can then research what else you can do from a hopefully decent base line. Tipp: of all the options in sqm-scropts simplest_tbf.qos/fq_codel is the computationally cheapest that will allow the highest throughput, and if you goal is mostly to remedy the ISP's asymmetry somewhat that might be the best starting point.