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?