I disagree. I've used many ORMs in my ~20 years, and I've architected and designed several hugely complex systems under non-trivial load.

There are really two things I want to put out there:

1) My opinion is that about 90% of your standard, day-to-day queries work just fine in a good ORM. The developer _should_ know enough about the DB schema and SQL to handle the other 10%. (In our 10 y/o enterprise software, the only queries we really drop down into SQL for are complex windowed reporting queries.)

2) Eloquent ORM is... different. It's probably the best I've seen. I wish it existed in other languages. Sequelize, which may be the "best" in the JS ecosystem, doesn't hold a candle to Eloquent, IMO.