I agree with you, but I do think there's a little fuzziness between full-blown ORM and a tuple-populating query builder in some cases. For example Ecto, which can have understanding of the table schema and populate a struct with the data. It's just a struct though, not an object. There's no functions or methods on it, it's basically just a tuple with a little more organization.
> It's just a struct though, not an object. There's no functions or methods on it
Object-relational mapping was originally coined in the Smalltalk world, so objects were in front of mind, but it was really about type conversion. I am not sure that functions or methods are significant. It may be reasonable to say that a struct is an object, for all intents and purposes.
A pendant might say that what flimsy definition Kay did give for object-oriented programming was just a laundry list of Smalltalk features, meaning that Smalltalk is (probably) the only object-oriented language out there, and therefore ORM can only exist within the Smalltalk ecosystem. But I'm not sure tradition ever latched onto that, perhaps in large part because Kay didn't do a good job of articulating himself.
