People who avoid ORMs endup writing their own worse ORM*. ORMs are perfect if you know how and when to uses them. They encapsulate a lot of the mind numbing work that comes with raw sql such as writing inserts for a 50 column database.
I poorly implemented SOLID design principles, creating a complete mess of a SQL Factory, which made it impossible to reason about the query unless I had a debugger running and called the API directly.
Complex queries I write myself anyway, so Claude fills the 'ORM' gap for me, leaving an easily understood project.