Reducing boilerplate can be very valuable. Why would you want to spend time writing yet another query when you could be focusing on the parts of the application that deliver value to your customer?
Maintainability is also something to think about. The classes you write for the ORM implicitly document the content model. It can be very hard to decipher the same information from a "show tables" and reading a bunch of SQL SELECT statements, especially if they are all mixed up in the code and broken up with string concatenation and variables. Future maintainers will be able to read the documentation for the ORM which will probably be better than trying to understand a bunch of custom code to deal with complex queries.
For an example of this, notice how in the article the author's "linking table" was nowhere to be found in the ORM section. That got abstracted away! Someone having to analyze the tables directly will be running into those sorts of things all over the place, which is more mental overhead for understanding the system.
Maintainability is also something to think about. The classes you write for the ORM implicitly document the content model. It can be very hard to decipher the same information from a "show tables" and reading a bunch of SQL SELECT statements, especially if they are all mixed up in the code and broken up with string concatenation and variables. Future maintainers will be able to read the documentation for the ORM which will probably be better than trying to understand a bunch of custom code to deal with complex queries.
For an example of this, notice how in the article the author's "linking table" was nowhere to be found in the ORM section. That got abstracted away! Someone having to analyze the tables directly will be running into those sorts of things all over the place, which is more mental overhead for understanding the system.