I can't speak to the GP, but I can say I've written a few systems ('moderate' in size, with a growing dataset) and was able to do the first pass and go for 6 months or so without needing to write any SQL. I ended up writing some because some reports needed to be run fast. The ORM was working, but doing more than it needed to, and it was easier to just write the SQL in that case than it was to try to figure out how to express the use cases in the ORM (GORM/Grails, using Hibernate under the hood).

I can't say I never write queries, but on the few Grails projects I've worked on over the past 18 months or so, I've probably needed to write fewer than 15 queries total.