In my experience ORMs work well for smaller projects and at the beginning. Once the code matures, it is much more performant and simpler to use direct SQL.

One thing that really resonated with me from the article is the following:

> Every SaaS product should offer a plug-and-play thing so that I can copy all the data back into my own SQL-based database (in my case, Postgres/Redshift).

Totally agree, a data dump should really be a standard feature (and not take ages to produce either).