I have the same response every time I hear this: like 95% of application CRUD plumbing is much better served by an ORM. It gives your application typed versions of your data, lets you work with objects rather than rows, which are almost always more useful, is much easier to read, etc. Then for the 5% of critical/complicated queries: just use SQL there. In fact your ORM almost certainly has an escape hatch for you to do that.