In my experience, you're super wrong about the vast majority of PHP engineers
And PHP has wide built-in support for multiple database engines (check out PDO) so this is largely not a part of an ORM.
This leaves the ORM to focus on higher-level work, like how to abstract the differences away regardless of which engine you end up using and focussing on the representation of your data and the API you use to interact with it.
That's pretty powerful and has allowed tools like Laravel and Symfony to suit a super wide range of needs.
But yes, it does also mean that you're not switching your entire language or framework stack when some database technology providers baits-and-switches their licensing - which has been known to happen
And PHP has wide built-in support for multiple database engines (check out PDO) so this is largely not a part of an ORM.
This leaves the ORM to focus on higher-level work, like how to abstract the differences away regardless of which engine you end up using and focussing on the representation of your data and the API you use to interact with it.
That's pretty powerful and has allowed tools like Laravel and Symfony to suit a super wide range of needs.
But yes, it does also mean that you're not switching your entire language or framework stack when some database technology providers baits-and-switches their licensing - which has been known to happen