This is probably partly due to the fact I find working with django rest framework serializers / views to be much nicer than django forms / views.
I think what puts most people off is the default requirement to go all-in and create an SPA with global state management and client-side managed routing, but this isn't actually necessary.
I have found incorporating Django with https://inertiajs.com to be a pretty solid alternative. I can write the whole frontend in React, and the backend in Django rest framework, but everything is still page based, so I don't require redux or any other kind of global state, just use the inertia utils to make page transitions.
NextJS is another alternative. To talk to a (django) API you need to go through getStaticProps and getServerSideProps which, depending on the location of your API server, can be a little slow, but you get pre-rendered HTML and page based routing so again no global state management required.