80% of the time, the queries the ORM produces are just fine. For the rest 20% left, I code them myself (I think senior engineers now how to distinguish these two scenarios). Now, what I don’t want to code myself is the transformation between rows and objects… that’s what an ORM is for.

The author presented their opinion as broadly stroked general advice and in that context it is poor. And, specifically regarding database/sql, creating a bunch of pointers to scan values into for every query you write is the definition of insanity in all but the most performance sensitive applications. We're talking microseconds (or even nanoseconds in some instances) on an operation typically measured in milliseconds.