I recently posted this about my experience in migrating to PostgreSQL without anything of the sort of ORM... https://henvic.dev/posts/go-postgres/
We achieved a really great result doing so. In comparison, at my previous workplace, I was forced to use ORM, and everything was slower, awful, and hard to maintain for no benefit whatsoever. I'm not saying that it's 100% fault of ORMs, but at least 60%, for sure it was.
Most apps don't need to be performant. Most business logic is object-centric and relation-centric. Leveraging the best features of highly-integrated frameworks like Django and Rails mean that the framework has to understand and talk to objects, not database rows.
I have maintained several Django projects with a couple hundred tables by myself or another team member. I cannot imagine maintaining such a gigantic heap of equivalent SQL for trivial business logic.
Long list of tools with usefulness.
I find people who tend to develop extreme on either end aren't that pragmatic.
I read your blog and I don't see any problems caused by ORM. Your product data model should fit in ORM (I get it, you're just using it as a simple example). The blog only mentioned "I used ORM in the past and had bad experience" without explaining the problems.
> In comparison, at my previous workplace, I was forced to use ORM, and everything was slower, awful, and hard to maintain for no benefit whatsoever
That seems to be the problem: your previous workplace, not the ORM itself.