Any ORM can handle joins. There are certain types of joins / aggregations / whatever that are harder for ORMs to support, and thinking that this is the fault of the ORM births monstrosities like Hibernate.

ActiveRecord for me hits a sweet spot in that it covers most of what you would need to do day-to-day in SQL and gives you easy ways to bypass it if you need to do something more complicated.

The biggest issue with ActiveRecord IMO is Rails devs who feel that falling down to raw SQL when it's warranted is wrong, and end up building insanely unreadable garbage using ARel (which in and of itself isn't a bad library, but should almost never be used in "high-level" code.)

I can't think of an orm that can't handle joins. I can think of way that relatively inexperienced devs might use an orm in a day that doesn't take proper advantage of it though (seen it). I don't see this as a reason to avoid an orm of course. In rails it's pretty trivial to load associations most of the time.

There are also some queries that I think are best handled by find by sql oreven just raw sql. Sometimes this is performance othertimes it's for clarity.

Overall if you use an form properly I think it can save time and improve clarity.