I think for a lot of things an ORM is “good” at, you could likely just have a bunch of static JSON files and retrieve them from disk with zero practical difference.
I just can’t wrap my head around why you even *need* a database in those cases.
Honestly I wouldn't deal with JSON files on disk except as a last resort. Aside from convenience, you need a DB for transactional reads/writes. But you don't need an ORM for that anymore because Postgres and MySQL have json/jsonb types.
I just can’t wrap my head around why you even *need* a database in those cases.