Additionally I think the migration management that most ORMs support are also a good thing. Defined and type-safe forward and backward strategies are helpful in most cases, especially if you'd like to support more than one DBMS.

I personally think that ORMs are good for management and simple CRUD cases, QueryBuilders are good for managing more complex queries while still being secure / type-safe and for everything else a thin database abstraction layer for native SQL queries with parameters / prepared statements is still required especially for performance use cases.