My two cents
I suppose that hydration (Object Hydration and lazy loading, of course) is good until you don't know how many and what fields to pull from DB tables and put into objects. If you know that you have to retrieve all fields, is better to get them once and work with them, instead of do every time a query that is time-consuming.
However, as a good practice, when I have retrieved and used my objects I unset them explicitly (not if they are last instructions of my function that will return and implicitly unset them)
Update
$my_obj_repo = $this->getDoctrine()->getManager()->getRepository('MyBundleName:my_obj');
$my_obj = $my_obj_repo->fooHydrateFunction(12); //here I don't pull out from db all data
//do stuff with this object, like extracting data or manipulating data
if($my_obj->getBarField() == null) //this is the only field I've load with fooHydrateFunction, so no lazy loading
{
$my_obj->setBarField($request->query->get('bar');
$entity_manager->persist($my_obj);
$entity_manager->flush();
}
//here my object isn't necessary anymore
unset($my_obj); //this is a PHP instruction
//continue with my business logic