> reliable migrations (writing them by hand? no thanks. Outsourcing to another library like knex? no thanks)

IMHO, "real production features" means also caring about the long term maintenance, performance and reliability of the data.

My experience with ORMs (especially ActiveRecord patterns) is that it always becomes a mess once you reach a certain level of complexity. It is very fast to get started, but gets slower over time once you start having a lot of bugs and hard-to-solve behaviours.