I guess the way you describe it is the way I like to work, keeping my object model in code close to the relational model to minimize the mental and performance

I guess the way you describe it is the way I like to work, keeping my object model in code close to the relational model to minimize the mental and performance cost of mapping back and forth, and using a SQL library to minimize boilerplate. I don't think of it as using ORM because my favorite tools for working that way don't bill themselves as ORMs, but I'm not sure what I'd use in Python other than SQLAlchemy. Even projects that seem to be stripped down non-ORMs like SQLModel turn out to be built on top of SQLAlchemy.