Comment by mr_Fatalyst

I was surprised too when I saw the results. The benchmarks test standard ORM usage patterns, not the full power of any ORM. SQLAlchemy is more flexible, but that flexibility comes with some overhead. That said, the ORM layer is rarely the bottleneck when working with a database. The benchmarks were more about making sure that all the Pydantic validation I added comes for free, not about winning a speed race.