> The query translation and hydration overhead of transforming the data into objects even in a fast language are always going to be problems

No they are not. Have you measured this in a real-world application? This overhead is negligible compared to the cost of the query itself. And without an ORM you still have to load the data into some kind of objects or data structures before you pass it to presentation, you will just have to write the code yourself.

But yeah, lazy loading in a loop will kill performance. So don't do that.