I feel that ORMs can be useful in certain projects, especially ones where you are building a small app to interact with an existing database and want to get off the ground running fast. If you end up interacting with a dataset that is very relational, you'll start running into some of the edge cases of optimization in ORMs and end up with N+1 queries and such.

I have experience with Hibernate in Java and SQLAlchemy in Python. In general I like them both but I tend to avoid them for projects where the DB schema is simple and just roll my own DAO layer.