I think you are exactly correct, now I give it some thought.
When I do ReactJS I'm building much more powerful UI features. The Django stuff is just a bunch of forms and that is really easy to drive.
When I do ReactJS I'm building much more powerful UI features. The Django stuff is just a bunch of forms and that is really easy to drive.
Lately I've been writing little personal projects using Vanilla JS. There's something rather therapeutic about limiting one's self to zero dependencies. I'm wildly surprised every time I come back to Vanilla JS to see just how many core features there are. I can do modules in the browser now! Yippee!
And beyond that, not even using JS and just using Django Templates or Jinja is great too.
But I write a lot of software that monitors and controls mobile robots in warehouses. For that kind of wild state management of 100+ data sources, all with their own incomplete states, controls, unpredictably erroneous behaviours, React + Redux is just a godsend.
I think that part of it is just experience. You'll slowly learn to better predict which projects are likely to grow, especially in a way that needs a more expressive foundation.
I also think that the, "aw crap I have to re-write this from Django Templates to React" isn't exactly a bad thing. You've probably learned a ton about the problem you're solving by focusing on the problem directly in front of you[1] rather than trying to plan for the future problems that you don't quite understand yet. So when you tear it down to build the next iteration, the code you're replacing wasn't the valuable part.
[1] Not all projects are organic. But the ones that are, really benefit from a, "get this out in 2 weeks and learn what we don't yet know about it" rather than spending months trying to perfect some product that we're mostly just guessing at.
- F. Brooks