I've been slowly transitioning from using an ORM to just plain SQL. It's so much simpler. Less magic, more explicitness, and more control. Also, much better performance. I think the thing is to construct your model around the different queries you need to perform. In many cases, especially a CRUD-type situation, you'll end up with 10-20 different SQL queries, and that's it.

Once you break free of ORM’s I find the code so much simpler to maintain.

Here’s the query(typically multiple different subqueries and return types), here’s the params, give me all the data back and something like Dapper in .net is an absolute godsend to convert it.