well the "orm" is more like a database driver that can serialize to models than an orm.
but consider their stack there are better "starting" alternatives (they also used them before dapper), like Linq2Sql, EF Core, etc...
Also compared to other languages Linq and EF Core are way better than most alternatives (besides that some things are just not working, like lateral joins)
Lots of caching, lots of RAM, SSD storage, and a low-level ORM for SQL.