Exactly. ORMs, especially powerful and mature ones like DjangoORM or Active Record, can help with productivity and maintainability and for more complex use cases you have the chance to switch to raw SQL; However, it’s important for developers to know what’s happening under the hood and to know what will happen if they use a certain feature of an ORM. I can’t even count the number of times that when one of my coworkers and I tried to fix a performance issue, and after digging deep into queries and mechanics of the ORM, we’ve realized how ORM heed so much complexity from them and, how a certain data structure design and coding in a certain way can result in an inefficient data flow.