[lmm]

> But I don’t see how one could become an expert at writing ORM queries without knowing the underlining SQL, which means you’re putting in the time to master two languages.

It's like working in a transpiled language: you need to understand the intermediate language a little, but you don't need to master it. Indeed I'd argue that the ORM often corresponds more clearly to what's actually going on at the query planner level than the SQL does: pulling out an entity via an indexed link to another entity is very different from scanning through a table for cases where one value matches another, and they look different in the ORM and in the query planner, but in SQL they're both just "JOIN".