It is pretty confusing, which is why I advocate using only the core pieces of it. This way you get basically all of the benefits, but without each new developer needing to read through hundreds of pages of extra documentation to try to understand lots of random design patterns that might not even be a good idea in the first place.

When I've created style guides for startups, I've been pretty explicit about saying "We use REST framework, but here are all the pieces we don't use, and these are all of the sections of documentation that you don't need to read or understand."