Okay, now what does Kubernetes have to do with ORMs? Why does it even have a say in what applications we're running on top of it? Am I missing something?

In another tangent, I still use raw SQL queries in most cases over ORM. That's just me. May be I'm a control freak or I just dont know how to magically use the abstraction of ORM and still get the most optimised results.

In a complex environment, that will not always work. We use an ORM at work for all simple CRUD stuff, but when you want something more complex and performant, we end up writing sql anyway.

(On a db the with millions of daily transactions)

I am not. I am sorry if that sounded ambiguous. By "By hand" I meant SSH into a container and then pasting raw query into SQL client. ORM will not always help you achieve what you want so writing queries is alright, but you need to have tests too. You can create a command for your app (like a Django command for example) that performs the query, but you also create tests that prove it is doing what you think it is doing. Then you run this command in the cluster. This way you can replicate it to different environments etc.