[Cloven]

I would say there's a difference. PHP is bad because it has a wide variety of objectively awful design flaws, its standard library is a conflicted mess, and it's unperformant. Implementing it into a modern architecture is highly correlated with sloppiness and technical debt.

ORM is bad because the impedance mismatch between an object and a relational model is very difficult to get right.

Frequently, for example, one iterates over collections of objects in the OO paradigm. A naively written ORM, or one without sufficient introspection into the loop intent, can translate that into N select statements, each incurring a network round trip.

The end result is that OO programmers have to understand not only their object code, but also the relational model, and finally too the ORM's peculiarities and suboptimalities. So in attempting to solve one problem, most of the time you end up with three.

That said, there is a sweet spot in ORMs for simple code (e.g. most web apps, where ActiveRecord and Sequel and the like are fine). But there's no sweet spot for PHP code. Every line written is technical debt.