Why hear in absolutes? I said essentially what you did: "Different projects may have different requirements"
You find ORMs useful, I do not, they aren't mutually exclusive.
Also, An ORM is inappropriate for certain forms of inter-team collaboration. Data scientists often prepare SQL that we need to integrate into our services. Asking all at a company to learn a language specific ORM isn't practical. SQL is, for better and worse, an important common tool.
