I came here to say that any article discussing the benefits/downsides of ORMs should include JOOQ. It takes such an interesting spot in the design space: not an ORM, but a super flexible, type-safe query builder with lots of helpers so you dont write more code than necessary.
I work at a place with sort of a homebuilt ActiveRecord system made of generated code. JooQ did all the same mapping and object creation just by inspecting my database with a bunch of boilerplate Maven XML, so I wouldn't have to rely on the homebuilt version of SQL join.
