The only area of development where ORMs haven’t been the cause for at least some trouble in my career has been with relatively small and completely decoupled services. Even here I’ve had to replace countless ORMs with more efficient approaches as the service eventually needed to be build with C/C++. That being said, I don’t think any of these should have been build without the ORM. The rewrite would have been almost as much of a hassle if there hadn’t been an ORM after all.

I’m not really against ORMs as such. I’m not a fan of code-first databases for anything serious, but as far as CRUD operations goes I don’t see why you wouldn’t use an ORM until it fails you, which it won’t in most cases, and in those cases where it does… well similar to what I said earlier you just wouldn’t have build it to scale from the beginning anyway, and if you had and it turned out it didn’t need to scale then you probably wasted a lot of developer resources to do so.