For a long time these were the main choices and the third way had very little library support and generally required you to role your own, which were generally

For a long time these were the main choices and the third way had very little library support and generally required you to role your own, which were generally crappy and inefficient. Even when "lightweight ORM's" were first gaining traction their composability was quite poor (and some ways it still is) and would often leave the denormalisation part to the application. Even though I think this third way should be the "default" way to write an application now there's an awful lot of code left over from when an ORM was better.