I think you hit the nail on the head.

I’m thinking about what Rails would look like without activemodel and activerecord. Or even just without activerecord, where we had to write the same sql every time we wrote a model but introduce the opportunity for a dev to screw it up. Imagine starting on a legacy code base and all the models had subtle differences in how they query the db. They don’t have the established conventions around _id fields, polymorphism, the nice bits around joins, and instead you have to discover bugs where you did a join but the two models each have a field called “description”…