I guess this depends on the framework in use, but for example, in Hibernate you add a single "include" clause to avoid n+1 queries. It is only "magic" if you do

I guess this depends on the framework in use, but for example, in Hibernate you add a single "include" clause to avoid n+1 queries. It is only "magic" if you don't understand how it works, but then your SQL would be just as inefficient. Any ORM I know allows you to easily drop down to raw SQL when you need it - but in the majority of cases you never need to. Writing everything manually in SQL with tedious boilerplate wrappers because you might need to manually optimize some queries at some point in the future seems like a massive violation of the YAGNI principle.