I am the same, the advice of "learn SQL" is still very important. Most ORMs have the escape hatch of just mapping results of a straight SQL query to an expected structure (thinking of typed languages like C#/Java here). 95% of the time I can just use the ORM to make simple queries in a easy to maintain way for your application. For the 5% of queries that are either complex or can't be easily represented via your ORM of choice, declare the expected type response and use that escape hatch to write your performant SQL.

I've been on projects where the team has re-invented an ORM organically, and I've never seen it go well. Likewise with projects that are ORM 'purest', bending themselves over backwards to use an ORM for a query that can't easily be represented by whatever query syntax it has.

This is why I still think 'lite' weight ORMs are the best of both worlds since they usually have a pretty good experience for common/easy queries but then when things get tricky, it is best to just use SQL and map to an app language data structure for the results. I mostly use OrmLite [0] in dotnet and have found it has a balance that done well by me for years (note I now work at ServiceStack who built OrmLite).

[0] https://docs.servicestack.net/ormlite/ormlite-apis#query-exa...