Huh, okay, that's fair. ActiveRecord was the first ORM I worked with, and ActiveRecord in 2013 was easily poor enough to color my perspective on the category. I've heard Hibernate criticized before, of course, but I didn't realize it both predated ActiveRecord and was so much worse as to leave ActiveRecord even in its day looking good by comparison.
I still think Rails gets the blame for popularizing the concept, but I suppose that has to be mitigated by prior art making it so easy to popularize - "it's just like what you're used to, but won't make you want to kill yourself to use" is a pretty compelling pitch.
LOL. I feel like a geezer whenever I talk to people about what enterprise software was before RoR came along. XML. So much XML. Do you think that you should write XML in order to query data from a DB with a perfectly serviceable query language? People sure did think that in 2001!
You joke, but honestly, it's still the same class of problem. I don't think I should write TypeScript in order to query a DB with a perfectly serviceable query language, either, and I've seen so much time get spent on dealing with the headaches condign upon leaky abstractions to render the productivity benefits claimed by ORM proponents transparently nonsensical. And yet...
I still think Rails gets the blame for popularizing the concept, but I suppose that has to be mitigated by prior art making it so easy to popularize - "it's just like what you're used to, but won't make you want to kill yourself to use" is a pretty compelling pitch.