As someone else mentioned, the fact that this is a tired point actually bolsters my argument; I’m not exactly the first person to run into this. Table rows and objects just aren’t the same thing and you get really leaky abstractions treating them as such.

Why do you think the comment is so common if it was never the case?

Missing knowledge / lack of documentation. Django for example has a couple ways to see the SQL, but the most useful one (generating it from a specific QuerySet) I can't find in the documentation - I only know about it from an answer on StackOverflow.