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!
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.