[tmjdev]

Guardrails seems to be a common argument. It feels heavy handed though to use an entire library/ecosystem to ensure you don't have typos, your tests should catch them anyhow.

And migrations are a separate feature that a number of ORMs have, you can have clean migrations with pure SQL using a tool like gomigrate.

I think the real utility is that the ORM is doing the marshalling for you.

[reducesuffering]

I can't speak for ORM's like ActiveRecord or Django's, but Prisma doesn't feel heavy handed to me at all. I'm doing mostly reads right now so all it does is:

#1: Schema in 1 simple file. No create/alter table

#2: migrations integrated with that schema. Don't need to pick out a migration lib like gomigrate or make sure it works well other ORM niceties.

#3: Simplified queries in lang of choice. Again, I didn't need to update SELECT statements at all for a new column, which could be several places in a codebase.

So it doesn't feel heavy handed when I end up touching only a few lines of ORM-related code compared to thousands of UI or business logic. I'll look up some Prisma-specific syntax maybe once a week.