I agree completely, the features the parent is mentioning like "identity mapping, unit of work, and change tracking/events" are exactly the things I don't want out of the ORM because that is the leaky abstraction I don't want to constantly be working with and around.

If it was just a query builder we could have a conversation about the benefits of that vs sql and when one beats another. But it is all kinds of other features that are implicitly activated and then conspire to ruin your day when you were trying to solve some other problem. ORMs bring too much baggage by default. So now you have to talk about its relative merits compared to just writing SQL and the merits of always having these other features activated. Which other features? You need to read your full ORM manual because they really vary from one to another.