I think the author's point is that by the time you have gone to learn all of the complexities of an ORM, and all the steps you must take to sidestep when you can't bend it to shape... you could have much more easily written it by hand.
If you have a Declarative Batch Query, then you you get a bunch of SQL and plumbing code for free. The join and the iterative code you'd need to do that writing it "by hand" is 10x more.
