Ten years ago, there was a blog post every other week bemoaning ORM's. Ten years ago, those posts often had merit.

In 2016, this sentiment is outdated. A few points:

1. If you think that using an ORM means you don't have to learn SQL, then you're going to have a bad time. This is where most of the bad press originates... from people who never really learned SQL or their chosen ORM. An ORM provides type checking at your application layer, and typically better performance (unless you plan on hand-rolling your own multi-level cache system). But you still must understand relational database fundamentals.

2. If you're not using an ORM, then you ultimately end up writing one. And doing a far worse job than the people who focus on that for a living. It's no different from people who "don't need a web framework", and then go on to re-implement half of Rails or Spring (without accounting for any CSRF protection). Learning any framework at a professional level is a serious time investment, and many student beginners or quasi-professional cowboys don't want to do that. So they act like their hand-rolled crap is a badge of honor.

3. Ten years ago, it was a valid complaint that ORM's made custom or complex SQL impossible, didn't play well with stored procedures, etc. But it's 2016 now, and this is as obsolete as criticizing Java by pointing to the EJB 2.x spec. I can't think of a single major ORM framework today that doesn't make it easy to drop down to custom SQL when necessary.