Super fast and easier to use force multiplier in the beginning, but eventually you break free of the siren song and run into some negative that eats away at your time until you reach that “if you had just sucked it up and written the damn sql you’d be done yesterday” stage.
The vast majority of companies like this don’t fail because their UI is too slow. It’s because they don’t have “essential” features that other platforms do. If you have good monitoring and metrics, you should be able to find the bottleneck in your ORM and resolve it before any users even notice. And that means you’re hand rolling a few queries instead of the entire data storage layer.
"...premature optimization is the root of all evil."
Sometimes you just wanna get stuff out there, other times you're winning and you wanna give users the best experience. Many people have had to do both. You start with an ORM, eventually your queries are slow and all, you gradually reap them out. Almost every Engineer I know has had to do that at some POINT. Nonetheless, I am not about writing SQL for a simple barbing saloon booking app that I am not sure anybody will eventually use.