Absolutely, “ORM == bad” viewpoint strikes me as highly ignorant of all the benefits they provide, particularly in statically typed languages.

People like me don’t choose an ORM to save me from having to learn SQL (which you’ll still need to know), it’s because 99% of the time it’s a no brainer as it vastly increases productivity and reduces bugs.

In a language like C#, EF Core can easily cover 95% (likely more) of your SQL needs with performance as good as raw SQL, for the small percentage of use cases its performance is lacking, you fall back to raw SQL.

But if saving you from writing 95%+ of SQL queries was not compelling enough, it’s just one benefit of EF Core. Another major time saving benefit is not having to manually map a SQL result to objects.

But an often super underrated and incredibly valuable benefit, especially on substantial sized code bases, is the type safety aspect. The queries written using LINQ are checked for free at compile time against mistakes in column or table names.

Want to refactor your schema because your business domain has shifted or you just understand it better than before? No problem. Use standard refactoring tools on your C# code base, have EF Core generate the migration and you’re done in 10s of minutes, including fixing all your “SQL queries” (which were in LINQ).

EF Core is almost always a no brainer for any team who wants high quality and velocity.