ActiveRecord was, even then, a much better ORM than exists in the Node world today. It was full featured and well hardened, and required basically no setup other than a class declaration. Plus, you could always drop down to the SQL if you needed to. Generally, it was a joy to use, and the performance was usually good enough.

At some point, I gave up on even trying to use any Node ORM's because they were clunky and offered no value. It was easier to just drop straight to a knex session and write the queries natively.