In my experience, it quite rarely uses cross apply, and typically only for functions where you're doing complicated join filtering and trying to extract full EF

In my experience, it quite rarely uses cross apply, and typically only for functions where you're doing complicated join filtering and trying to extract full EF entities. If you don't use linq you can't get EF entities anyway, and if you don't need EF entities you can can still use linq to get a projection and avoid the cross apply! The worst case scenario often ends up being writing a linq query to get your primary keys, then loading entities just using the list of keys. I've used linq for years and it makes the basic and intermediate stuff way simpler, and the complex stuff no more complex. In hundreds of thousands of lines of code, we have exactly TWO queries where it ended up simpler to hand write SQL, and EF did not prevent us from doing that!