Couldn't agree with this more. The way I like to put it is "ORMs make the easy parts slightly easier, but they make the hard parts really hard". But I don't care that much about improving the easy parts, because they're already easy! Yet I can remember plenty of times when ORMs made my job a million times more difficult and all I was doing was fighting with the ORM itself (and usually at the worst time, e.g. when a query reached enough scale that it "fell over").
Query builders aren't exactly the same thing, but I love this article, https://gajus.medium.com/stop-using-knex-js-and-earn-30-bf41..., and it's made me a huge fan of Slonik and similar technologies. It does 90% of what I want a query builder or ORM to do (e.g. automatic binding of results to objects, strong type checking, etc.), but it lets me just write normal SQL. I also never understood this idea that SQL is some mystically difficult language. It has warts from being old, sure, but I'd rather learn SQL than whatever custom-flavor-of-ORM-query-language some ORM tool created.
Query builders aren't exactly the same thing, but I love this article, https://gajus.medium.com/stop-using-knex-js-and-earn-30-bf41..., and it's made me a huge fan of Slonik and similar technologies. It does 90% of what I want a query builder or ORM to do (e.g. automatic binding of results to objects, strong type checking, etc.), but it lets me just write normal SQL. I also never understood this idea that SQL is some mystically difficult language. It has warts from being old, sure, but I'd rather learn SQL than whatever custom-flavor-of-ORM-query-language some ORM tool created.