> ORM is a necessary evil when working with RDBMS, as are things like schema migrations that can easily result in loss of data (I.e., dropping columns or tables).

Hmm, neither of those been necessary for me. ORMs is a choice, you can choose not to and still have a proper design and architecture and not suffer from that choice. Requires you have programmers who know how to use SQL, which seems less and less common as the days go by though, so understandable most reach for an ORM.

Schema migrations that can "easily result" in data loss is even easier to avoid though. Don't drop the column/table in the same step you copy data to the new place, or do the migration via application code which gets cleaned up later, to catch most of the stuff before one bigger copy, and then the eventually DB cleanup.

Guess it depends on how careful you want to be, or how careful your agent lets you be, I guess. But it's definitely possible to avoid both of those "necessary evil", which I guess makes them just "evil".