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.