Precisely this. I came from the Django world to try starting a Node.js project, and was absolutely blown away by how immature ORMs and even database libraries felt. In Python, you have SQLalchemy and Django ORM, both of which are fantastic and make ample use of the language. But for JavaScript, it felt like an uphill battle, especially if you want to do anything fancy.
Of course you don't _need_ an ORM or at least you definitely don't need one as full-blown as Django ORM. But I didn't even feel comfortable using any of the solutions I saw that were supposedly the 'best.' And yet, when I went and evaluated the solutions, I do agree they were the best - I just never felt like they were mature enough to really use yet. As far as not using an ORM goes, certainly this is doable, but at the end of the day if you don't want to hardcode a bunch of SQL queries and statements you probably are going to need to write code that will begin to look awfully like ORM code for basic operations...
Most Python libraries are a lot more mature than NodeJS libraries. This makes sense because they are also often a lot older. That being said, all ecosystems have their up- and downsides. Fpr example, I think package management for NodeJS is infinite amount of times better than for Python. Pipenv only came around one year or so ago.
Of course you don't _need_ an ORM or at least you definitely don't need one as full-blown as Django ORM. But I didn't even feel comfortable using any of the solutions I saw that were supposedly the 'best.' And yet, when I went and evaluated the solutions, I do agree they were the best - I just never felt like they were mature enough to really use yet. As far as not using an ORM goes, certainly this is doable, but at the end of the day if you don't want to hardcode a bunch of SQL queries and statements you probably are going to need to write code that will begin to look awfully like ORM code for basic operations...