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Thanks, the articles looks great!

There is no "line" as such. Also to say that an ORM will give you "worst performance" is just bullshit. Yes, it's slower than plain SQL. But it can easily be faster than any model that got too fat because every single possible query is in there specificly. And it'll be loads better than anything that was overoptimized without using DRY principles and ends up in uneditable spagetti code. The Orm doesn't care how many object (rows) are in your database, that is about the scaleability of your DB engine and has nothing to do with Orm performance. The number of queries is up to you as well, as Phil argued it's important to understand how an Orm works in order to use it effectively. When it does matter is when you're loading a huge amount of records into runtime at one time, thus I wouldn't use the ORM for displaying a page with 1000 records - but up to about a 100 records should be fine (assuming they don't have big binary or gigantic textfields).
Easily the most taxing part of the ORM is object hydration: putting the database data into model instances, which is why a big number of records in runtime will take up both more time and memory than just fetching it from the database and using the result directly (logical as that's what the Orms starts with and does some stuff on top).