I think part of the reason they are not talked about anymore is that people like to talk about the hot and sexy and not the mature and incrementally improving.

I think part of the reason they are not talked about anymore is that people like to talk about the hot and sexy and not the mature and incrementally improving. The hot and sexy now is full of Javascript and noSQL so ORMs aren't as relevant as before. ie: schemaless JSON + dynamic languages have eaten a big piece of the cake. That said, people seem to still use ORMs in Ruby, Java, C#, etc. and frameworks look fairly mature.