I agree, the “batteries included” approach makes it very attractive for a new startup to use to get off the ground quickly. But in every case I have seen (3 separate companies now) it lets the team run up a huge amount of tech debt and get a lot of features locked into a very unscaleable, unperformant, architecture.

It’s tempting to prototype with it, but I can’t think of a single use case that wouldn’t be better served with another framework.

Django is not appropriate for production imo

What a load of crap. I worked for 10 years on a huge code base.

Using flask and SQLAlchemy is worse in every way for example.

Yes, those would also be a very bad choice for a large project. But at least they have the advantage of being very lightweight so can be a good fit for adding simple crud features to a microservice, especially ML services that already need to use python for other reasons.

Django is the worst of both worlds. Not suited for small services, and not able to scale with large ones.

To your "load of crap" point, web development looked very different >10 years ago, Django was a lot better fit for that era. There is _zero_ reason to use it today.

What would you suggest as an alternative?

Entirely agreed. This has been my experience as well.

What makes you think Django is terrible

I worked with it exclusively for a year. Its ORM is magic, its performance is terrible, its configuration is cryptic at best, its handler system is worse than just writing your own.

Everything about Django is terrible.

I worked with it 10 years.

The ORM is pretty trivially understandable and not magic at all.

The configuration is pretty straight forward and we'll documented.

The url routing is pretty good although it could be improved. It's a lot better than flask when you go beyond an MVP at least.

Sorry, but creating reverse reference fields at runtime that can't be statically checked or enumerated is 100% magic.

You mean of the models? But those are literally created at import time. That's as close to "statically" as things get with python really (except the text of the code).

Would you mind pointing to the example of a system with less or no magic?