>... particularly from devs who don't know databases well I think that a lot of your argument just boils down to this. The Active Record pattern allows less ex

>... particularly from devs who don't know databases well I think that a lot of your argument just boils down to this. The Active Record pattern allows less experienced/knowledgeable developers to write CRUD code that works. These are the same devs which would often create unnecessary quadratic (or even worse) solutions in regular imperative code too. Their code would often be far from pretty or optimized, but using modern high level languages and libraries, they can relatively easily get the job done and provide business value. If given a dichotomous choice between libraries that are make it easier to write and to reason about out of the box, or libraries that perform much better but only "when you know what you're doing", most would choose the former. And I think they'd be right, there's enough complexity out there in the actual domain already. But it's actually even better, it's not actually a dichotomous choice, and it's generally quite straightforward to bring in a more experienced dev to help refactor and optimize such code later, when the need arises.