Joins only make sense in analytical context as a tool to get some additional data into your report and almost never as domain modeling concept. People should pretty much hardly ever use RDBMS for their domain data... but since everyone learns RDBMS as their first DB, we have these horrible ORM frameworks on every corner.
They are powerful. But often their Power is unnecessary and counter productive for domain modeling.
Where are they really good is reporting. Analysts love rdbms. When I am on an analyst role, I love them them too. As an engineer I find them redundant.
Yeah, I've kind of railed against ORMs for a while now... I'd just assume a simple data mapper (like Dapper for C#) or be really explicit in a scripted language with template queries.
