"this is mostly because i relied on a SQL ORM which in short is a tool that makes writing SQL easier to pick up and faster to develop. the biggest downside is that it might execute 50 queries to your database to get a list of information, when it probably only needs 1, which will cause slowdown."

I appreciate this honesty. Listen to this old man's advise: learn SQL properly. It's not that hard. Focus on it for a few weeks intensely and you've mastered it for life. Then just write SQL directly.

I've had weekends ruined troubleshooting my "highly productive ORM layer" that nuked a production database. Whilst functionally speaking my ORM code was in no way incorrect. I'm talking differences of a thousand fold in query load depending on how one expresses the ORM calls.

You can then become proficient in trying to reason and predict about what your ORM calls do in the actual database, but when you're several joins deep, this becomes near impossible. At which point you become the ORM, and might as well just write SQL.

Honestly, I started on the ORM hate train when I first started and wrote my own queries in an effort to be "performant", but my frankenstein of writing direct queries and abstracting code to be reusable became basically a super shitty ORM that was a nightmare to maintain for a large codebase lol. I don' think there's anything wrong with it and for 90% of CRUD actions it's what you should choose. By the time you hit performance issues you've probably thought of something else anyway.