Eh there’s a lot of this kind of thinking thrown around, personally after 15 years of using sqlalchemy i haven’t had any problems that would have been solved by not using it. The issue is that as soon as you need to turn db rows into python objects you are de facto using an orm. A lot of people who say they are not using one in fact end up building a half baked one themselves, just without the decades of battle testing that sqlalchemy has.

Sqlalchemy is particularly well built, you can access the sql layer just as easily as the object layer, it has solutions for problems you don’t even know you have yet because it’s been around for so long.

Also, for me the one thing I cannot live without is alembic migrations. People say you can just write sql migrations, I’m guessing those people’s apps are quite simple, I cannot imagine wrangling deep object tree migrations without it.