I haven’t seriously used an ORM for the simple reason that I find SQL simple enough to not need to learn an extra DSL to hide it. Furthermore, when I’m done figuring out the query I need in a Jupyter notebook (technically Google colab, should be same), I can just paste it to the C++/Go server or the dashboard config. Raw performance didn’t ever matter that much to me.
With all this: is there an ORM with documentation that’s good at explaining what would I gain over plain old SQL?
Have you ever used a rapid development framework like Django or Laravel? A good ORM is basically the core of any decent backend framework that interfaces with a RDBMS. You get to define a schema once which can then be used as a foundation for migrations, validation, queries, serialization, etc. Many ORMs may only help solve one or two of those things well, and in personal experience it is rare to see even okayish JavaScript ORMs, which may contribute to why people hate the category of tools.
Flask is okayish imo. People tend to use it with an ORM called sqlalchemy. There is also FastAPI as an alternative to Flask and Django in the Python web framework space. Just about anything can be used for small projects in a vacuum. I used to make websites with framework-less PHP files and mysqli.
With all this: is there an ORM with documentation that’s good at explaining what would I gain over plain old SQL?