Where ORMs are clearly weak is in generating suboptimal queries and making it too easy to create N+1 issues. My first introduction to ORMs was Ruby on Rails. You would rely on New Relic to identify performance issues and then fix them.

With solid AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md, I do not think this would happen as much anymore in new code. So then it is just a matter of style preference (ORM vs whatever else).

That's exactly why Oxyde has no lazy loading at all. If you don't call .join() or .prefetch(), related data simply won't be there. N+1 is impossible by design, not by discipline.