While I agree with this, the quality of ORMs vastly differs. For instance, the ORM style that wraps sql in a dsl is strictly better than one that encourages model lifecycle callback hell, as activerecord does. The latter is never necessary to work with a database and is a terrible pattern long-term for composing database interactions: it is extremely difficult to reason about what will actually happen inside the transaction (or immediately after).

Tl;dr you aren’t wrong, but many home-rolled ORMs are simpler and much easier to use than, say, activerecord.