I wonder how much of that is just maturity of the ORM frameworks and their being hidden/built into other web or app stacks.
Shush.
:)
It is also good news not everyone needs huge performance and maintainability at the same time, life goes on.
While it's true that one reason to not use ORMs is performance, I don't think that not using ORMs implies that the application will be harder to maintain. It all depends on the RDBMS and how comfortable you are with mostly-SQL (on the server side) applications.
Sure thing, I'm just glad ORM is finally understood by more people and looks peaceful now.