I agree that SQL is generally superior to using an ORM. However I'd argue that SQL is a lot harder to learn and significantly harder to master than any given OR

I agree that SQL is generally superior to using an ORM. However I'd argue that SQL is a lot harder to learn and significantly harder to master than any given ORM for most developers. It's very easy to write code for basic queries that performs terribly when writing SQL by hand, whereas ORMs will frequently produce code that is reasonably optimized. In many situations the performance difference between SQL and an ORM is comparable to writing assembler code to optimize your C program: significant in theory but negligible in practice. This gets even worse if you consider that most developers in a team will not touch the queries frequently enough to ensure their SQL skills don't get rusty eventually, even if you managed to bring them all up to speed in the first place. So in practice it'll be about deciding whether the team uses the ORM (that probably already comes with whatever framework you're using) or maintains badly written SQL with a few high performance sections nobody dares to touch because nobody remembers how it worked (e.g. pivot tables).