You aren't forced to use it. It's strange that a single library would make you avoid the entire ecosystem, even though it's one of the most advanced ORMs available.

It permeates everything .NET; try finding documentation that doesn’t assume you’re an EF adherent.

Any documentation that doesn't have to do with EF has nothing about EF. You can use whatever data access code you want. There are thousands of examples of Dapper, for example.