ORM is one of those "dark grey boxes" we often have to deal with. When they work as intended, they can indeed save time, but when they don't, you have to fiddle in an organic fashion to solve or work around the problem, because otherwise they are thousands of line of code if you wish to dig in code-wise.

As an alternative, use stored procedures with Dapper, or use smaller sub-helpers that prepare most of the SQL statements or sub-statements for you but don't outright hide it. They assist in creating SQL (and prepared statement parameter mapping), but only assist, and are kept to less than a few hundreds of lines of code.

Other dark-grey-boxes include URL route mappers, seen in MVC stacks, and HTML formatters, such as Razor. When they don't work right you'll waste many many hour fudging with them. I'd often rather replace the URL router with Case/switch statements: it would be easier to debug; so what if it's a bit more typing. It's a white box.