Well said, people confuse hype, growth with death. If something is not hyped or people some folks are switching to something else then it is prematurely declared "as dead" which is a fallacy of thinking.
As bad as it is, it enabled our team of all backend devs to stand up a functioning infrastructure management tool that was mission critical to the business's success in the early stages, for relatively low effort.
I guess it just depends on what you're using the tool for.
You need to do a lot of overrides on things [1] and changing up the model / form behaviors etc. gets a bit clunky, but at least is manageable [2].
I will say that 99% of my work is using django+drf for REST API purposes, so I wasn't previously familiar with django templating / forms, etc. - maybe that is where the bulk of the learning curve was.
1 - https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/howto/overriding-templ...
2 - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/7860612/django-admin-mak...
It's like that old saw from Strousstroup: "There are two kinds of programming languages. The ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses".
I'm sure you're off by several orders of magnitude.
I'm partial to Symfony. Good "getting started", per component documentation and links to cookbook-style articles for things people tend to want to do.
If the claim had been about ugliness, then you may have had a point, but it was not, it was about UX.
> Bad Official Admin GUI UX
For anyone reading, Django's admin tool is designed for situations in which you need to stand up a quick admin or build some internal admin functionality. For more complex cases, you build your own admin to fit your user needs (including the UI/UX). From Django's own documentation:
> The admin’s recommended use is limited to an organization’s internal management tool. It’s not intended for building your entire front end around. [1]
Also, regarding documentation, in my opinion I have yet to see any project have better documentation than Django.
[1] https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/3.2/ref/contrib/admin/