I once boasted about avoiding ORM until an experienced developer helped me to see that 100% hand‑rolled SQL and customer query builders is just you writing your own ORM by hand.

Since then I've embraced ORMs for CRUD. I still double-check its output, and I'm not afraid to bypass it when needed.

Exactly, and any good ORM will let you drop down to pure SQL if you need to for the weird cases.

Not really. ORMs have defining characteristics that hand-rolled SQL with mapping code does not. Eg, something like `Users.all.where(age > 45)` create queries from classes and method calls, while hand-rolled SQL queries are...well..hand-written.