> issues with Django's ORM due to the query laziness making performance tricky to reason about

It's infuriating that this is still not a thing you can disable (https://code.djangoproject.com/ticket/30874). Pretty much my only gripe with the Django ORM which I'm a huge fan of (and I also write lots of SQL).

There's a library that solves this for you, thankfully https://github.com/charettes/django-seal.