You're on the right side of the bell-curve meme my friend, but there are a lot more people in the thick-framework camp who spend their days getting lost in the complexity of ORMs and related tech...
It's more like the world is not black and white, engineering problems don't have "The perfect solution, the rest is trash", but rather "this problem has multiple solutions, depending on context, some have these tradeoffs and the others have these".
In this particular case, it might not be worth to trade speed of having to think about SQL for performance (today or tomorrow). Maybe you're building something that will just be used by 2-3 people, so 1+N isn't really a issue.
Or whatever, the conclusion as always is: it depends.
I agree it depends, but my hot take is almost universally the time people like to say ORMs save them they end up paying back in spades debugging them. Learn SQL!
I really think it is more a matter of exposure and familiarity than bell-curve positioning. If any backend engineer with 1 year of ORM experience had spent that year instead becoming familiar with SQL, the speed bump would be practically nil.