The main problem is ORMs are more work, because you need to understand the ORM. That’s its own beast, each ORM is different, and they change between releases. But SQL is something you already should understand, so you get to reuse the knowledge.

Also you can make SQL much more tolerable if you use migrations. That’s really where ORMs shine, but you don’t need the rest. Also query builders, although those also have a risk of abuse similar to ORMs. 99% of SQL should be static. That sounds like an absurdly high percent but it’s true if you use all the SQL features.