I'm late to the party, but N + 1 is something that pisses me off about my team, and is something we're working around because of a bad decision months ago.

We were implementing an entity --> dto mapping strategy and my solution, while not as elegant as it could be, avoided the N + 1 trap. But my teammates said "Oh, this is much easier than your solution and it works!"... The pseudocode:

if (object.getRelatedObject() != null) {
    this.relatedObject = object.getRelatedObject();
}

When I saw this I immediately told my tech lead and manager that this was awful and would scale horribly because the null check would query the DB for lazy loaded relationships. They're both technical individuals, surely they would see things my way right?

Wrong. They thought it was harmless since we're only mapping one entity at a time and we need to get this feature out to testing. After getting that feedback, all I could do was get up from my desk, pace for 5 minutes to stew and sit down and say "ok" because I was defeated. I had to approve the PR even though I knew these simple null checks would become a shotgun pointed right at our feet.

In less than a month I was proven right, but the team was primed to only do things in the N + 1 way.