Not using an ORM is a solution in the same way that the solution to changing a car's oil is to not own a car. I've spent a good 20 years building web apps. The

Not using an ORM is a solution in the same way that the solution to changing a car's oil is to not own a car. I've spent a good 20 years building web apps. The speed and productivity of having an ORM like Django's a well-integrated into business logic is unparalleled with the possible exception of Rails and Laravel, maybe. Systems that have 50+ tables become _trivial_ to maintain by one person. You can refactor an underlying database table without having to rewrite queries. There are entire classes of refactoring that go away with the ORM. Serving database objects with Django Rest Framework or building up CRUD interfaces with the Django admin would simply be impossible otherwise. Getting the hang of the ORM took me all of 6 months to build up to the nastiest of edge cases, which are functionally as difficult to debug as any complex SQL query with window functions or esoteric functions. The discourse is irrationally framed towards the first months of learning, for a technology that I've been using for 14 years with _no_ sign of finding a replacement.