> they just tend to make it less obvious you're doing something unperformant

Is this being positioned as a strength, in your comment?

It just is what it is. Sometimes you want to write the obvious query without the DB getting in your way, and other times you want to know as soon as possible that you're doing something that won't scale under exponential load. At this point in my career I prefer the latter, but the former will always have a special place in my heart.