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> And ORMs have the advantage of abstracting this SQL away for you allowing that you to work across databases if you need to

In theory, in practise my experience is the oppose. It's easier to understand and tweak the SQL to work across DBs. You can easily diff and compare the SQL files. The ORM is another moving part, it adds convenience for simple queries, and complexity for anything advanced or non-standard.

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SQL dialects vastly differ especially past SQL-92. And those differences tend to be very annoying (e.g. RETURNING). There is a reason that people do not generally work across different RDBMSes and instead pick and stick to a single RDBMS because it is really a PITA; I do dislike ORMs for usual reasons, but a bare SQL is not the alternative either.

And yet the strategy most ORMs take is the common denominator where you have no idea if it'll actually use RETURNING or fire off a completely separate query with a potential race condition because SELECTs go to the read-only replica.

(Ask me how I know about this kind of problem with ORMs.)

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