This seems very situation specific. If you write lots of fun queries, I see how it may not be that useful. But the most common case for people is honestly going to be User.find(id=params.id) and Things.find(owner=user). That's like 99.9% of the internet. Saving the time of writing that trivial query and dealing with the result is perfect for ORMs.

> And they're always lazy, so you never really know when the N+1s are going to happen.

There are tools to detect this. Please use them regardless. Even if you're writing queries but hand, enough functions on the stack can hide an N+1