True, however it occupies the same niche an ORM occupies, without the foot guns. Updating a slew of different db tables from rather clean and straightforward models is relatively simple. It tries to live somewhere between just doing everything as SQL and abstracting everything away like AR does, giving you conveniences from both approaches. You don't get mired in scoping hell, but you don't have big ugly messes of nearly-identical SQL statements either.

i'd recommend trying it out https://hexdocs.pm/ecto/Ecto.html