I've been doing ORM on Java since Hibernate was new, and it has always sucked. One of the selling points, which is now understood to be garbage, is that you can use different databases. But no-one uses different databases. Another selling point which is "you don't need to know SQL", is also garbage. Every non-trivial long-lived application will require tweaks to individual queries at the string level. The proper way to build a data layer is one query at a time, as a string, with string interpolation.

Couldn't agree with this more. The way I like to put it is "ORMs make the easy parts slightly easier, but they make the hard parts really hard". But I don't care that much about improving the easy parts, because they're already easy! Yet I can remember plenty of times when ORMs made my job a million times more difficult and all I was doing was fighting with the ORM itself (and usually at the worst time, e.g. when a query reached enough scale that it "fell over").

const postRepository = connection.getRepository(Post);

await postRepository
  .createQueryBuilder()
  .update(Post)
  .set({ status: 'archived' })
  .where("authorId IN (SELECT id FROM author WHERE company = :company)", { company: 'Hooli' })
  .execute();

const postRepository = connection.getRepository(Post);

await postRepository
  .createQueryBuilder()
  .update(Post)
  .set({ status: 'archived' })
  .where(qb =>
    const subQuery = qb
      .subQuery()
      .select("author.id")
      .from(Author, "author")
      .where("author.company = :company")
      .getQuery()
  return "post.authorId IN " + subQuery
)
  .setParameter("company", "Hooli")
  .execute();

- return "post.authorId IN " + subQuery
+ return 'post."authorId" IN ' + subQuery