I definitely think you're right that as ORMs move farther away from the bare SQL abstractions leak and when things break they break in bizarre hard to grok ways

I definitely think you're right that as ORMs move farther away from the bare SQL abstractions leak and when things break they break in bizarre hard to grok ways. But I also think that heavier duty ORMs have their place. Recent circumstances have meant that I'm building out a lot of applications from start to finish in one to three weeks. These applications deal with very little data, the largest tables are in the 1000's of records and in circumstances like that I need crank developer productivity to 11 and for that I'm willing to sacrifice performance and simplicity. And for that EF has been a great companion. I've also used a combination of EF and DACPAC. Where I used DACPAC to manage the schema and migrations and used EF for CRUD and that's been a pretty great combo. And I definitely have to drop down to sql, especially for reporting/analysis type queries.