I've worked with (iteracted with maybe is better) node.js on the server, but it was only to serve up a SPA, the client side was all written by a front end dev in whatever framework (I can't even remember which). The server side I wrote in Grails, so I've never written anything server side using node.js
That said an ORM can really help a lot (I've used
https://hibernate.org/ a lot, it's a Java ORM).
They do things a certain way so sometimes if you need to go outside how they want to do things it can be bothersome, and getting the ORM to create the tables exactly as you want them can sometimes be fiddly, but I found in general they save a lot of work.