Very true. But ORMs did make it particularly easy to trigger N+1 selects.
It used to be a very common pitfall - and often not at all obvious. You’d grab a collection of objects from the ORM, process them in a loop, and everything looked fine because the objects were already rehydrated in memory.
Then later, someone would access a property on a child object inside that loop. What looked like a simple property access would silently trigger a database query. The kicker was that this could be far removed from any obvious database access, so the person causing the issue often had no idea they were generating dozens (or hundreds) of extra queries.
It used to be a very common pitfall - and often not at all obvious. You’d grab a collection of objects from the ORM, process them in a loop, and everything looked fine because the objects were already rehydrated in memory.
Then later, someone would access a property on a child object inside that loop. What looked like a simple property access would silently trigger a database query. The kicker was that this could be far removed from any obvious database access, so the person causing the issue often had no idea they were generating dozens (or hundreds) of extra queries.