I don't the "everyone uses it" argument works here. Sure, it has a lot of momentum, but I'm just not seeing the proposed productivity enhancements. I actually just spent a significant chunk of time to de-ORM a system to get some performance and, more importantly, clarity back.

IMO it's way, way easier to look at some queries instead of some leaky abstraction (on top of the already leaky abstraction that is SQL).

Again, I really don't think popularity is a sane metric anymore. (React, "Astro", Angular, web-dev in general)

Edit: I'm very much in a bubble. A lot depends on your tooling and environment. For example I can appreciate it being different in an MS environment with stuff like linq. I'm not in that environment.