I don't disagree with any of the major gripes people have with orms and I find SQL to be much cleaner in a lot of circumstances.
That being said, if orms didn't force you to explicitly define your domain models about 60% of developers would simply never do it. And you would see differently structured, ad-hoc interfaces defined all over the code base completely entangled with whatever action they are trying to perform.
ORMs being a forcing function for domain modeling is enough benefit for me that it outweighs all of their obvious limitations.
That being said, if orms didn't force you to explicitly define your domain models about 60% of developers would simply never do it. And you would see differently structured, ad-hoc interfaces defined all over the code base completely entangled with whatever action they are trying to perform.
ORMs being a forcing function for domain modeling is enough benefit for me that it outweighs all of their obvious limitations.