Not so simple. Every big enough place will be a disjointed mess of cross-cutting concerns. The ORM (usually another custom mess on top of some open source thing

Not so simple. Every big enough place will be a disjointed mess of cross-cutting concerns. The ORM (usually another custom mess on top of some open source thing) ends up being owned by everyone and in effect ends up being owned by no one. So then you end up going around asking each team in turn to fix stuff but each team consists of domain experts and not ORM/SQL experts so no one does anything. So then you bring in ORM/SQL experts but they don't have any domain knowledge so they just chip away at the edges and end up making no improvements and you still are stuck with an ORM nightmare. The bottleneck in fixing technical things is never the technical stuff. After all, most of this stuff is 70s tech to begin with and the science has been worked out by much smarter people already. The social stuff on the other hand is a different matter entirely and once you're in an ORM quagmire it is impossible to get out.