ORMs are really useful when you want to pull your data in a deeply nested format that a junior developer can work with easily. Manually nesting table rows is tedious, and stitching together data on the fly requires you to understand the complete data model, which might be outside the purview of some developers.

I should be clear though, from an architecture standpoint I think it's much better to go straight to SQL, and keep the data unnested. Like anything in life, it's a trade-off. It requires more up-front data model knowledge and more up-front work, but it's much easier to debug, more flexible, and performs better.