That, and generally ORMs are out of practice as well. Using rails without ActiveRecord is almost pointless to me. Even when I was programming primarily in rail

That, and generally ORMs are out of practice as well. Using rails without ActiveRecord is almost pointless to me. Even when I was programming primarily in rails in it's hay-day (2010 - 2013), I was always swapping out my inefficient AR queries with just custom SQL. I am generally a "performance doesn't matter that much" kind of guy, especially when people try to micro-optimize, but one place it matters a lot is with your data. These days I just go straight for SQL and save myself a lot of trouble. There will always be impedance mismatch between your data store and models, and ORMs in their ambitious attempt to serve every use case, at times, generate some really inefficient queries. ORMs really like to stay within relational SQL databases as well, with half-baked support for a couple NoSQL stores like Mongo, but then get into Cassandra or Dynamo territory and they are useless.