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ORMs are great to spare you from writing heaps of error-prone boilerplate mapping code.

Which is kinda what they are for, that's why they're called "Object-Relational Mappers". Not "Object-Relational Query Generators". Because they suck at the latter.

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ORMs help you the first three weeks. After that it is a lead ball around both feets, dragging you down into dark pits of bad performance, incomprehensible relations, and impossible debugging.

That anyone with more than 6 months of experience still drag Hibernate up from their chest is just absolutely beyond my comprehension.

I think if you're doing basic CRUD operations on small tables with relatively simple relations, then ORM is just fine. This is to be blunt what a lot of applications do, and so a lot of them justifiably use ORM.

That said, the moment you leave the small table simple relations space (by e.g. having a table with a quarter billion rows), then ORM is not a good choice.

Usually they’re not even really relational mappers, but table mappers.

Not sure what you mean: (in a rdms) a table is a relation.

Yes exactly. ORMs are usually only good at representing tables, not general relations.

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