I think orms are typically fine. Something like rails can even play reasonably well with legacy databases (but you might need to create a view or two to rename columns names that collide with "magic column names").

There are reasonable arguments for leaving most to the db; effectively exposing some VIEWs and FUNCTIONs as the application interface for any and all bindings. Like legacy java and greenfield php for example.

I'd say it's different work rather than strictly more work.