Much as Lisp'ers say,

    Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp.

If one says, "we don't use an ORM", you will incrementally create helper functions for pulling the data into your language to tweak the data or to build optional filters and thus will have an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of an ORM.

There is a time and place for direct SQL code and there is a time and place for an ORM. Normally I use an ORM that has a great escape hatch for raw SQL as needed.

The main advantage of an ORM isn’t query building but its deep integration with the rest of the ecosystem.

In Django, you can change a single field in a model, and that update automatically cascades through to database migrations, validations, admin panels, and even user-facing forms in the HTML.

ORMs are mostly useless they make easy queries easier et hard query a lot harder.

I'd skip the ORM as well but your reasoning doesn't make any sense