People always say this and my experience in C# has been the opposite. I've never wanted to reach for raw SQL and hardly ever do, only if its because there's no extension to do SKIP..LOCKED or something
var name = dbContext.Users
.Where(u => u.Id == 123)
.Select(u => u.Name)
.First();
var name = dbContext.Users .Where(u => u.Id == 123) .Select(u => u.Name) .First();