Much is said about what to learn, but when you learn it is just as important and I'd like to see more written about that. Is an ORM good to help onramp beginne

Much is said about what to learn, but when you learn it is just as important and I'd like to see more written about that. Is an ORM good to help onramp beginners, or is it some syntactic sugar for experts who already know SQL very well? Or both? Or neither?