Joking aside, generally we call "magic" uses of reflection, monkey-patching, auto-magically configured parts, parts of a framework that do way more than what we explicitly tell them, etc.
"1/5 less magic" is what we call in casual conversation "making a point" and not an actual measurement. It is however more than 85% factually correct.
The Django project leaders have stated that one of their goals was to not have "magic" in the framework, and in fact, one of the early (~ Django 1.2 or so) refactoring efforts was about removing "magic" too-clever parts for more explicitness.
Disqus
Instagram
Knight Foundation
MacArthur Foundation
Mozilla
National Geographic
Open Knowledge Foundation
Pinterest
Open Stackhttps://www.quora.com/Would-Pinterest-consider-Flask-in-plac...
Most of the projects in OpenStack use Flask or Pecan - or Falcon for one or two of the more performance sensitive APIs
But see for yourself: https://github.com/reddit/reddit
I don't know where I got that idea from.
Also, here's an interesting thread on Artima: "Please Teach me Web Frameworks for Python!"[1] by Guido van van Rossum[sic]. It's 11 years old (a lot has changed since?), but interesting.
[0]: https://github.com/python/pythondotorg
[1]: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=146149
https://www.wyc.io/posts/just-build-it-in-django-or-rails/
Instagram, Disqus, Bitbucket, Pinterest.
Apologies in advanced for any marketing copies you don't want to read. The information is there.
[1] https://engineering.instagram.com/web-service-efficiency-at-...
Considering that Django has 1/5th as much "magic" as Rails, and that Rails powers some of the biggest websites on the world, I'd say "citation needed".