I find this question to be very weird. I have never seen ORMs as tools for completely abstracting away the database. I have always seen them as convenience APIs for using the database. They exist to make your code shorter, less repetitive, more readable, easier to reason about, and more maintainable; not to make you forget about the database altogether.
I also don't see ORMs as exclusive. It's fine to use ORMs for 95% of your use cases, but drop down to raw SQL for the remaining 5% where it's not a good match. That's still a win for the goals I mentioned above.
I also don't see ORMs as exclusive. It's fine to use ORMs for 95% of your use cases, but drop down to raw SQL for the remaining 5% where it's not a good match. That's still a win for the goals I mentioned above.