The problem with ORMs is that they make DB calls seem cheap, and when your application is young and you don't have a lot of rows, everything works wonderfully.

The problem with ORMs is that they make DB calls seem cheap, and when your application is young and you don't have a lot of rows, everything works wonderfully. Then all the N+1 problems start adding up and the SELECT COUNT(*) performance issues. Since the ORM code is baked into the models, your code is littered with these calls -- in the service layer, views, background workers. That's why I really like Promises/Futures in Javascript. You know exactly when you're executing a DB operation and you have to think about the implications more. It's not just a simple object accessor.