I guess that there’s not many people going to write a long essay on how they use ORMs moderately, knowing the limitations, and it’s perfectly fine. It wouldn’t gather a whole crowd either.

What feels wrong to me in this post is the lack of nuance on how they used their ORM. For instance the whole part on how the ORM generated queries they wish were done in a different manner: why didn’t they bother writing either lower level code or just raw SQL to get their data as they wished ?

It looks to me they could have kept their ORM for the 80% cases it works great, and hand tune the 20% that could be problematic. Just like any other optimization problem.

There would be still the performance part where some overhead would still be there, but it’s usually not an issue if the ORM option was on the table in the first place.