The thing I learned from working with EntityFramework (aspnet) and Django ORM is that people don't really care to learn how those ORM work, they (the devs) ended up generating utterly unoptimized queries, from adding unnecessary inner joins to loading a ton of nested tables. I'd say for both ORM I mention you can pretty much have total control to tailor your sql to your needs (and still have the benefit of easier refactor).

Ofc in the end a raw sql string will always give an edge (see Dapper).

I've never used an ORM (Hibernate, Doctrine) when you can't also write the queries yourself and then leave the object mapping to the ORM.

It's not an either/or.

Often I'll use the ORM for saving, and SQL for retrieving.

Only to end up writing your own ORM in the end. It's feels like a waste of time writing raw SQL. Plus it's difficult to maintain

In 2 past jobs as a non ruby person in ruby shops i was trying to convince them to write raw sql queries instead of relying on activerecord, but with no luck. I won’t argue about performance but most of the times didn’t even know what and how many queries were being generated..