ORMs are not an either/or decision. You can use an ORM, save yourself time with the usual repetitive "CRUD", result set mapping, etc. and then drop down to SQL

ORMs are not an either/or decision. You can use an ORM, save yourself time with the usual repetitive "CRUD", result set mapping, etc. and then drop down to SQL if you require something complex (like reporting.) On the other hand, I've worked at companies where they built their own barely functional ORM. It was total garbage. The original developer did not understand prepared statements, so you can imagine how well that worked out. We'd regularly hit SQL errors in production because a quoted string came through.