The original designer for my most active product I work on choose EntityFramework. Used it for about 1.5 years before looking at the SQL statements it produced. It was a excessive UNION mess. Things that should be simple where 10x more complex.

Slowly replaced it with Dapper and handwritten SQL, a simple migration versioning system, and database seeding with validation. Once that was done, startup time was cut by more than 10 seconds on a standard SSD and about 30 on CFast. Even finally replacing the database connection with SQLite standard libraries shaved off 2 seconds.

EntityFramework maybe useful but it lacks performance when time to start using the software is important.