[rspeele]

Lazy loading was a mistake in EF. A lot of apps had awful performance due to lazy loading properties in a foreach loop creating N+1 queries to the database. It would be fine in dev with 50-100 rows and a localhost SQL and blow up in prod with 1000s of rows and a separate Azure SQL.

Also if you relied on lazy loading properties after the DbContext had been disposed (after the using() block) you were out of luck.

With old EF we would turn off lazy loading to make sure devs always got an exception if they hadn’t used .Include() to bring the related entities back in their initial query. Querying the database should always be explicit not lurking behind property getters.

Fortunately with EF core MS realized this and it’s off by default. EF with wise use of .Include and no lazy loading is a pretty good ORM!

[tracker1]

I switched to Dapper a long time ago, with explicit SQL queries and really haven't looked back.