If it’s something simple, I’ll use Django template because it’s very easy. Most stuff I work on these days requires more fancy ui so I’ll 100% use react or nextjs for front end (and I’ve be using zustand for state management). I’ll have an api util that uses axios and handles appending a jwt auth header to all requests and use that in my components. I like using Django-all-auth because it makes integrating email/google/microsoft auth really easy out of the box.

DRF is good, ninja is a little more light weight and flexible so it really comes down to the project.