I'm always very skeptical of this sort of claim. How are you constructing queries? Bespoke string concatenation? That's a recipe for disaster. How do you compose queries? That is, given the questions "give me all posts owned by user X" and "give me all posts newer than timestamp Y", how do you ask for all posts owned by user X that are newer than timestamp Y? Is that a completely separate question? If so, that quickly has unmanageable multiplicative effects. Do you write a layer that knows how to take the two original queries in some abstract form and build the correct WHERE ... AND ... clause for the composed query? Well, now you have a bespoke and immature version of an ORM.
I can understand peoples' disdain for ORMs (which tend to be large dependencies that are more frameworks than libraries), but I don't understand not having a query construction and composition layer, and usually the popular ORMs for a language have the most mature implementations of that. In Ruby, there is actually both ActiveRecord (ORM) and Arel (query composition). Nobody really uses Arel directly, though, but I think that's a shame.
I can understand peoples' disdain for ORMs (which tend to be large dependencies that are more frameworks than libraries), but I don't understand not having a query construction and composition layer, and usually the popular ORMs for a language have the most mature implementations of that. In Ruby, there is actually both ActiveRecord (ORM) and Arel (query composition). Nobody really uses Arel directly, though, but I think that's a shame.