I suspect it's because many developers are introduced to programming through web development. The pedagogy fails them and they go on to successful careers believing falsehoods.
It's hard enough to learn a programming language the first time that I can see how ORMs and frameworks relieve the burden of having to learn SQL, RDBMSs, etc.
However it's a convenient lie that seems to rarely ever be corrected.
The reality is that ORMs are exactly the wrong abstraction. They introduce premature pessimization into your application. They are not structured around how your data should be designed but how data-structures in your language of choice are designed. And left uncorrected they lead many developers to the mistaken belief that RDBMSs are slow, inflexible, etc, etc.
It turns out that relational algebra gives us great tools for querying complex data structures and relationships and building consistent, correct abstractions.
RDBMS servers have great facilities for managing and interacting with our data. Procedural languages, authentication, authorization, inter-process communication, etc, etc.
I also have a theory about this when it comes to a bit older devs (like 30+, yours i think relates to younger ones). We've entered our careers in the days of php4 and mysql4 and in those days if i remember correctly, mysql did not have all these nice features postgres has today and also the query planner was not that powerful, joins indeed were painful. We did not have access to databases like Oracle so this is where the culture of fat middle layer comes from, because it was the only way. But ppl, 15 years have passed, databases are monsters now, postgres can do 1.5M tps on a single box. How many of you are working on projects with that kind of scale ...
It's hard enough to learn a programming language the first time that I can see how ORMs and frameworks relieve the burden of having to learn SQL, RDBMSs, etc.
However it's a convenient lie that seems to rarely ever be corrected.
The reality is that ORMs are exactly the wrong abstraction. They introduce premature pessimization into your application. They are not structured around how your data should be designed but how data-structures in your language of choice are designed. And left uncorrected they lead many developers to the mistaken belief that RDBMSs are slow, inflexible, etc, etc.
It turns out that relational algebra gives us great tools for querying complex data structures and relationships and building consistent, correct abstractions.
RDBMS servers have great facilities for managing and interacting with our data. Procedural languages, authentication, authorization, inter-process communication, etc, etc.