Its really not though. C is just sugary Assembly that abstracts some things but the design patterns are aligned. ORMs promote a fundamental mistake of coupling your object model to your normalized data model.
Great comment. Whereas typical object models have many relationships and out of these, nested data, the optimization for SQL lies essentially in the other direction. Your DB should be optimized for speed, your code for use and readability. These are concepts, IMO, that are a classic trade-off against one another and it doesn't make sense to combine them into a single abstraction.
The basic idea of the relational model was actually data independence, i.e. optimization for flexibility. If you are interested you can have a look at the original paper from 1970:
https://www.seas.upenn.edu/~zives/03f/cis550/codd.pdf
