[ducdetronquito]

Good read, TIL!

That being said, I use Django daily for 10 years but I don’t understand the ORM besides basic CRUD. Even a simple group by looks weird.

Writing plain SQL feels easier and more maintainable in the long run.

[storystarling]

I've mostly switched to raw SQL for these kinds of queries too. It seems like the maintenance burden is actually lower when you can see the explicit query plan, rather than trying to reverse engineer what the ORM is doing with the joins.