I am in the same boat as you currently. I work with Django almost exclusively these days and use the ORM in every project. The difference is that I am working with mostly normalized databases and datasets in the 100's of megabytes. This is a great place to use an ORM. You get all the simplicity and quick prototyping and pay very few penalties. When you have a slow query you can usually address it by adding some select_related() or prefetch_related() and you are done.

What this thread is talking about is when you have datasets that are several gigabytes in size and up, when you have many dozens of tables, all interrelated and when you need to squeeze as much performance out of your hardware as you can. When your code gets complex enough where you cannot just insert an object, but have to do all manner of verification through half the DB first. Or where you need to operate on 100,000 rows in an intelligent manner very fast (think using stored procedures and complex query parameters). This is a place that you might end up and if your entire codebase depends on an ORM, you are often out of luck.

In the long run, I think there several things to do: (1) know SQL well, (2) use an ORM when you know the project will be small, and (3) anticipate that if you are growing and using an ORM, you will need a re-write.