I am not against Hibernate. I am against not knowing what it emits.

The failure mode is always the same

Something is slow. Someone adds a fetch join. Something else becomes slow. Six months later the mapping is a knot of hints and nobody wants to touch it, because the mapping now encodes performance decisions rather than the shape of the domain.

What we changed

• Reads that feed a screen go through explicit SQL and map to a record. The screen is the contract, not the entity.
• Writes stay with the ORM, where identity and dirty checking earn their keep.
• Every non-trivial query has its plan captured in a test that fails if it changes shape.

The codebase got longer and considerably easier to reason about. That is usually a good trade.