And yet this problem kind of goes away in a key value or graph database. I wonder if the ORM mismatch is often not one of objects getting in the way, but one of using relational in the first place. At anyrate, how you manage your objects (for things like search) is ideally orthogonal to the objects themselves; though this is difficult to accomplish in practice.

I use objects in reactive (non-persistent/DB) systems all the time. Objects aren't the problem, but you do have to manage your dependencies dynamically by tracing/dirtying/and cleaning. Objects actually excel at encapsulating and managing state, it is much harder to do this with functions (see all the work on functional-reactive programming).