This is a pragmatic piece of Fowler on the rather dry topic of Object-relational mappings - in short, the attempt to marry an object-oriented code base with a relational data base.
Usually you’d get enough early success to commit deeply to the framework and only after a while did you realize you were in a quagmire - this is where I sympathize greatly with Ted Neward’s famous quote that object-relational mapping is the Vietnam of Computer Science
What Fowler refers to here, is Ted Neward’s article “The Vietnam Of Computer Science”
Your last paragraph can be fixed even without an ORM though. Rust has libraries like diesel and sqlx that verify the sql in various ways.
Diesel is an ORM and sqlx requires a modern macro system, that many established languages lack.
This is kind of stretch to say though - it is not an ORM if you compare it to something like ActiveRecord. Diesel is just a DSL for writing SQL queries that are verified by the compiler.
I wouldn’t say it requires using macros. You could definitely imagine verifying queries in the same way in languages without macros. But yea, this is one of the strengths of Rust I suppose.