Practice · 2005–now · Cloud Scale
ORM-as-database
Hide SQL until N+1 queries own your night. Good ORMs survived; "never write SQL" didn't.
How ORM-as-database mutated
ORM-heavy failed as ideology because relational thinking cannot be abstracted away forever. ORMs stuck as productivity tools when teams still read query plans. The fad was pretending the database was an implementation detail.
Case studies
Compare with
Related
Platform · 1974–now
SQL / Relational
Declarative data that outlived every ORM fashion cycle. Postgres and friends keep winning by being boring.
Framework · 2004–now
Ruby on Rails
Convention over configuration. Taught a decade of frameworks how to ship MVPs — and how to hit scaling walls.
Framework · 2005–now
Django
Batteries-included Python web. Still the adult choice when you want an admin, auth, and ORM that behave.