My experience is that most developers are really bad with SQL. Because of that, they would rather use an ORM because they think they can avoid internalising the

My experience is that most developers are really bad with SQL. Because of that, they would rather use an ORM because they think they can avoid internalising the relational paradigm. But, guess what - if you don't speak relational then your table design will suck, which in turn will impact DB performance. Given a long enough time, you'll either switch jobs before this becomes a problem or you'll be forced to learn SQL properly. Most developers just switch jobs.