ActiveRecord has always felt great to me: yes there are some corner cases to deal w/ but it hits the 80/20 spot, let's you kick out to SQL when you need to, adds a lot of excellent life-cycle related hooks that clean up domain logic, and is pretty easy to reason about
pragmatic ORMs that don't try to hide everything behind a "bundle" or introduce their own query language are great, it's the ones that try to totally "solve" the ORM problem that are hard to work with
Yes I can’t imagine going back to doing big CRUD apps without AR, readability and maintenance would take a hit. The catch is you need a prior good knowledge of SQL to use it correctly. Problems happen when people don’t learn SQL and then don’t understand the queries AR is generating and the limits.
pragmatic ORMs that don't try to hide everything behind a "bundle" or introduce their own query language are great, it's the ones that try to totally "solve" the ORM problem that are hard to work with