Good points! As someone who uses both ORM and raw SQL (I actually really like SQL as language) I sympathize with both sides of this debate. I prefer the readability of ORM in my models when developing, but closely monitor and optimize for N+1 and other inefficiencies, when needed. "When needed" is never cut-and-dry, but I try not to optimize too early. I actually tend to start new projects from the database and will scaffold with factories, seeders, and raw SQL queries to get a sense of the data model prior to coding.

ORM's such as Eloquent in Laravel also have some nice methods to resolve N+1 and perform lazy loading, but it's always tradeoff.