Anytime this topic comes up, this opinion is invariably at the top of the comments. However I've never seen a non-trivial application made this way. Mind sharing one? More than the query generation, I think people reach for ORMs for static typing, mapping, migrations, transactions, etc.

I'm not doubting that it can be done, I'm just curious to see how it's done.

I formerly worked for a travel company. It was the best codebase I've ever inherited, but even so there were select N+1's everywhere and page loads of 2+ seconds were common. I gradually migrated most of the customer-facing pages to use hand-written SQL and Dapper; getting most page loads below 0.5 seconds.

The resulting codebase was about 50kloc of C# and 10kloc of SQL, plus some cshtml and javascript of course. Sounds small, but it did a lot -- it contained a small CMS, a small CRM, a booking management system that paid commissions to travel agents and payments to tour operators in their local currencies, plus all sorts of other business logic that accumulates in 15+ years of operation. But because it was a monolith, it was simple and a pleasure to maintain.

That said, SQL is an objectively terrible language. It just so happens that it's typically the least of all the available evils.

YouTube is one from my experience. The team there had a pretty strong anti-orm stance. DB performance was an existential necessity during the early scaling. The object fetching and writing tended to be focused through a small number of function calls with well scrutinized queries and write through memcaching.

The company I work for is one such example. We write inline SQL in a Python Flask+Celery app which processes >$3bn of salaries a month. The stated goal from the CTO, who was an early engineer, is simplicity.

Anytime this topic comes up, I ask: Why not both? I don't want to modify my SQL strings every time I change a column. Django ORM lets me combine custom SQL snippets with ORM code. I never hesitate to use custom SQL, but its just not a reasonable default for basic CRUD operations that my IDE can autocomplete. Not only that, but also provide nice feautures pike named arguments, walking relationships, sanitizations, etc. At the same time, I can do a UNIONS, CTES, anything I want. I just don't understand why it's worth arguing against ORMs, when no one is forcing you to stop using raw SQL.

I completely agree, it is absolutely essential to understand what SQL is emitted, and how SQL works. Perhaps the strawman argument against ORMs is that they preclude you from knowing SQL. They don't.

In addition to the great replies folks are sharing, I've found LLMs are quite good at authoring non-trivial SQL. Have effectively been using these to implemnt + learn so much about Postgres

I worked for a publicly traded corporate elearning company that was written this way. Mainly sprocs with a light mapping framework. I agree this is better as long as you keep the sprocs for accessing data and not for implementing application logic.

ORMs are way more trouble than they’re worth because it’s almost easier to write the actual SQL and just map the resulting table result.

My current company is built like this, and it’s great. I can’t think of a single production bug that’s come from it, which was my main concern with the approach. It’s really, really nice to be able to see the SQL directly rather than having to reason about some layer of indirection in addition to reasoning about the query you’re actually trying to build.

I've worked on a few, nothing I can share. I don't mind using an data mappers like Dapper in C# that will give you concrete types to work against with queries. Easy enough with data types for parameterized inputs as well.

Every single time. Where are these developers? Orms are a god send 98% of the time. Sure, write some SQL from time to time, but the majority of the time just use the ORM.