> [0] Entity Framework has moved on a lot since then, and apparently now can be trusted to lazily load data

To some degree. If you're using it for anything serious you're still going to help it along a lot. It's rather easy to do so, however, and I certainly wouldn't consider writing your own code as fast or easy as simply telling EF how you want it to do certain things.

I'm not an overall fan of EF. I especially dislike how it's model builder does not share interoperability with other .Net libraries which also use it. I also don't really like the magic .Net does behind the scenes. EF as a whole has been one of the better ORMs for any language since .net core. I'd still personally much prefer something like Rust's diesel, but whenever I have to work with C# I tend to also use EF.