> That's the key. ORMs get a bad name but most of the time you just want to display a list of things, or one thing in more depth or maybe create a new thing.

If you just need to display a list of things then there's nothing much simpler than:

  var result = exec_query("select * from things")
  foreach (var row in result) {
    //output html or something here
  }

The problem is we decided this was bad and had to add more layers, abstractions, translations and complications in between the database and the output, then we needed tools like ORMs to help with that.