I don’t mind query builders. They help you fall into the pit of success and reuse useful queries. The thing I don’t like about ORMs is how you get back a graph of objects, and you can mutate any of them and call `.save()` on any of them. They pretend to be a live representation of what‘s in the database, but they are a proxy. And so when saving, the ORM has to sync the alterations you made to your objects with what it believes is in the database. It treats database tables as just a bag of attributes.

I prefer to work with values and be explicit about what’s been read and what needs updating. If you need optimistic concurrency control be explicit about that too.