Hard disagree. ORM's tend to cater to the lowest common denominator functionality of relational databases so if you want to for instance, make use of jsonb in p

Hard disagree. ORM's tend to cater to the lowest common denominator functionality of relational databases so if you want to for instance, make use of jsonb in postgres, you have to use weird workarounds or drop into SQL anyways. SQL is a high level, declarative language. You need to use good libraries that ensure queries can be safely composed and arguments passed, but you are not automatically "making a mess" if you're writing SQL unless you or your tooling is incompetent. Personally, I really like Dapper (C#) as it solves the "object mapping" and "query composition" cases in a performant and ergonomic way while letting me write the (exact) query I want.