To be fair, in our DAL we use Entity Framework (which is kind of just an ORM++) and a good 95% of the queries we do are just straight up linq. The last 5% which use raw SQL are critical paths we found either directly through testing or as our customers systems gradually got slower as the database grew and needed optimisation.

Eventually the Juniors are expected to learn SQL, but until such a time as they do they can still make useful contributions to the code base.