[LaGrange]

> adding an off the shelf ORM layer creates so much more opacity and tech debt than writing queries I don't understand why anyone would willingly put one into their stack.

Simple: because if I don't, I'm going to spend the rest of my career explaining why I didn't to people extremely skeptical of that decision. Meanwhile even people like me tend to just shrug and quietly go "oh, an ORM? Well, that's the price of doing the job."

Also, ORMs are an endless source of well-paid jobs for people who actually learned relational algebra at some point in their lives, and that's not a compliment to ORMs.