OO abstractions are very effective in UI toolkits, but because a smaller proportion of folk are working on desktop apps any more, people tend not to get exposed to that use case.

I also think it depends on the type of ORM. Active Record? Really problematic except for simple use cases but because they make those simple cases easy they get popular on that basis. Data Mapper? Actually fine and very useful, but harder to write well and a bit harder to use.