Lots of growing love for returning to the template system and using HTMX with a bit of alpine sprinkled in as needed for interactivity.

I've been a fan of Django templates and HTMX. I like how I can get interactivity without too much complexity. I do have specific parts of my website that rely on more complex tools, such as Codemirror. Even then, templates work well enough for me, so I haven't found a compelling enough reason to adopt more JS for my website.

It's still the best RDB schema creation/migration tool I know of. It has a crazy number of plugins to handle all sorts of unusual field types and indexing. I usually add django to any project I'm doing that involves an RDB just to handle migrations. As long as you avoid any runtime use of the ORM it's golden.

I wanted to like HTMX and Alpine. But after a few medium sized projects with it I went back to vite/react for larger frontend. I found it so difficult to come back to old htmx/alpine code. If you got a complex UI to maintain I would personally recommend the React route. It is very easy to setup with Django.