I like the ergonomics of it though.

I'm dealing with some rather fun EF code inside triple nested for loops that runs several thousand queries before throwing a validation error. Now, I know that's the devs fault and not EF, but EF made it all just seem like harmless object oriented programming and not set operations.

I almost feel like I'd like EF for write operations, and Dapper for read operations. Strike a balance.

If its memory usage and execution speed are deal-breaking bottlenecks for you, then you're working at a scale few people actually work at. Here in the line-of-business web app electron mines, I get to optimize for developer productivity and simplicity.