I haven't built SPAs yet, but I'm looking into trying Unicorn: https://www.django-unicorn.com/
In the end I have to write a bit more of boilerplate each time (and with tools like copilot it's a non-issue) but it's 10x faster to understand what a view does and how when reading code.
I just use an IDE which allows me to Ctrl+Click into any symbol and see its implementation and underlying classes (and do so recursively if needed). That saves me from having to lookup the documentation all the time.
What I really like about Django and Python ecosystem in general is the kind of stability that it doesn't move too fast and break things, which happens in JS land too often. And Python is a nicer language of the two, for me at least.
But at the end of the day, you can combine both. I work for Baserow now and we combine Nuxt + Django. You can also simplify it to Vue/React + Vite + serve it with Django, use cookies-base auth etc.
Overall, I've found it great for prototyping up something really quickly. I think this is where the "batteries-included" helps a lot
I’d pick it for these reasons.
1. build your app in the normal, old way. just doing SSR for showing and editing boring content is so much faster than building it in react.
2. I have a tiny scrap of JS that digs through elements on the page, and if they have a class, creates a React root there and passes in some params. I then wrapped generating those replace-me-with-a-react-root elements in a Rails helper function.
(2 is my "fine I'll do it myself" after Rails 7's new js stuff broke react-rails for me.)
This might be colored by me being a backend dev and data engineer type of person and I have terrifically little patience for writing javascript. But pages where I've followed this "SSR + some React doodads for when you really need special sauce" pattern end up so much easier and faster to write than cramming it all into a huge SPA.
I'm sure if you're building something deeply fancy then doing it all in React makes sense, but I find there's really only a couple pages that actually do end up being 100% react and the rest end up fine just having a text field here or there or a little widget thingy being the React components and the rest just being SSR.
I'm sure this doesn't scale if you're google or something either but even on my most complicated pages this still loads visibly faster than many other sites I use.
I don't think currenlty there are any solid alternatives beyond Nestjs+Typescript, ruby on rails and laravel. The sentimemt of their community is that these frameworks are built for web development in mind. While I think for Python based web framework like Django the sentiment is that you are using Python already and here is a web framework written in Python. If you look at some of the Rust based web frameworks you will understand what I am saying. The merit of the framework is the language it was written in. This makes hiring web developers difficult as most candidates will be Python Developer who knows Django and not web developers who knows Python. There are very few people who learned Python to use Django. But everyone learned javascript to use nodejs, or ruby to use ruby on rails.
If I am writing enterprise level where Python is used I will pick one of those 3 frameworks and use a Python based API framework like DRF or FastAPI for building internal APIs.
If I need a database and interactivity I pair NextJS with Django Restapi.