I think an important benefit of a good ORM is to reduce the translations that you have to do between your mental model of the data and what you are trying to do with the data.

Before I started working a lot with SQL, ORMs fit my mental model better since I was more used to imperative programming languages and I thought they were easier to work with.

Now that I am very comfortable with SQL, I have to translate an ORM into the SQL that it would produce. So now they just add another step in between me and the data