I like ORMs for routine queries, there's a lot of stuff that is just much nicer and less tedious to write that way. It's also generally much less annoying to ha

I like ORMs for routine queries, there's a lot of stuff that is just much nicer and less tedious to write that way. It's also generally much less annoying to have some dynamic aspects in your queries with an ORM, e.g. adding different WHERE clauses depending on some parameters. But even with relatively small and simple things you can run into issues very quickly if you don't know what kind of queries the ORM will create. ORMs are very leaky abstractions, they're useful but unless you understand SQL and understand their quirks you're likely to create some weird and monstrous queries at times. You should know how your ORM handles related entities if you query them, there are some big footguns there with some strategies. And of course you should know how to use the ORM so that it doesn't do a "SELECT *" everywhere (which can be trickier than I'd like in some cases). I would also not hesitate to drop to plain SQL for some cases, if your query doesn't fit neatly into the capabilities of your ORM.