Even some of these issues ORMs are solving can be solved without them by caching a view of the data in structure of the object. Relational DBs are extremely well tuned for looking up and caching data in an easy to view manner.

Somebody else pointed out the problem is bad devs not learning their tools. I’d go so far as to say DB knowledge can (and was due a while) be a specialized field full of skills that will fall by the wayside for most devs because we aren’t doing super complex things in a single DB anymore with the preference going toward microservices. There’s no need to flex those skills and they depreciate over time.