I don't like the title, it implies that the only reason for using an ORM is not knowing SQL, which is obviously not the case.

Every time I tried to do a project without an ORM, using only raw SQL, I inevitably ran into:

- serialization/deserialization boilerplate. Like, having to manually map values returned by the DB library to object (or named tuple, or structure) properties

- poor code reuse, having multiple very similar queries that have just one small difference

- extra pain in changing DB schema. Adding a field requires to go and manually edit many queries

Anti-ORM crowd never gives a good answer to these issues.

Instead, they push strawman attacks like "oh, you only use ORM, because you can't write raw SQL". I can absolutely assure you that this is not the case. Every time I use an ORM (SQLAlchemy mostly, the one mentioned in the article) I am 100% sure what SQL do I want it to produce and what SQL will a particular ORM invocation produce.