Many times when people try to forgo them, they end up making their own poorly specified and half-baked version of it that only some people (who may leave the company) understand.
I don’t think ORM is the same since it’s more of an API than a framework (in my mind). ORM also falls into the platform-abstraction arena because it typically has multiple backends which provides other benefits. It also is served as a wrapper library converting from one language to another (SQL).
Web frameworks are more like… clever hacks to HTML to wedge in a “new way to do it” more clever than the last attempt.
Game engines are also somewhat different because the level of abstracted complexity there is vast and heavily domain-specific. It targets multiple platforms like ORMS and multiple GPU backends as well. It provides physics APIs and other heavy maths capabilities too.
But the browser standards-bodies provide that for us now. HTML5/CSS3/JavaScript will run well across all modern browsers.
I've only used laraval and knexjs over the last 10 years and have no idea which ORMs people are complaining about because the ones I used do not have the issues they talk about.
Many times when people try to forgo them, they end up making their own poorly specified and half-baked version of it that only some people (who may leave the company) understand.