I think the biggest pitfall is how it maps object model to SQL.

The thing people fear about SQL query generation - IMO it's a non issue - when you identify hotspots you write your query manually, tools for that are there, it's easy to do retroactively and >90% of the code won't be the critical path.

DbContext is basically shared mutable state between your entire execution scope, and worst of all it makes it non-obvious.

This is why I avoid ORMs in favor of writing SQL queries manually: I only need to understand one complex system for non-trivial cases instead of two.

(To be fair, I haven’t done any database programming for a few years. ORMs may have significantly improved since I last looked at them.)

Editing in general is hard. E.g. if in a form you change a field that participates in some filter which generates a dataset to be used in that form, it creates an issue that a naive join now returns incorrect data (because the join condition itself was edited). Complex ORMs which help with that^ are not leaky abstractions, they just try to avoid mistakes an average programmer would do anyway in “trivial” SQL tasks without blinking once.

And yes, gp question about x vs y means that no thought of editing contexts was ever considered. Plain old fetch-store is too low-level and doesn’t represent a model that business logic thinks in.

^ Idk about EF in particular, just assuming