[setr]

That’s just a direct result of lazy loading — if you don’t grab the related objects in the initial query, then there’s no joins to be had.

Most ORMs do lazy loading by default, but also have a way of doing eager loading — either requiring the nested object to always be loaded as well, or dropping down to some pseudo-sql.

In c#/EFCore, I always prefer to avoid lazy loading and just write LINQ, and just use the ORM to map the resultset back to objects