alt Hacker NewsYeah this really isn't so true anymore. I was a diehard Dapper fan for a long time, but the performance of EF Core is comparable to Dapper now. Dropping down to SQL in EF Core is super easy and parameterized. I just don't even bother with Dapper anymore. I have an app with ~200k users with the slowest query being ~6ms and of 1000s of queries only 3 are hand rolled complicated SQL written for perf executed via EF Core.
if you knew how to cook it, you could use make older EF Core (and original EF) go brrr. you sound like you do know. my problem is that it is hard to find out what exactly is the best without dropping down several abstraction layers, sometimes, as you noted, to raw SQL.
why not just construct SQL queries in a type-safe DSL, like, say, JetBrains Exposed does? you are writing what's basically SQL that your compiler understands and your existing tooling checks for free. (granted, C# may need an additional Roslyn analyzer, but it's still simpler than either guessing what transaction LINQ will make or writing SQL in strings.)