I’ve started a few projects with SQL over the years, and it makes for a much slower development cycle. Instead of solving business problems, you’re spending too much time focusing on query optimization, and any iteration that touches the db requires all the mapping logic to be painstakingly reconstructed. For me writing queries in SQL is for later optimization. But then again, I’m pretty strict about abstracting even the ORM stuff away into a data access layer, so maybe people run into problems trying to thread ORM models all the way through to their frontend code or whatever crazy things people get up to.