What did you use in place of the DRF serialization to get from DB -> json response?
For the DB requests Are you writing sql directly, using a different ORM, or something like sqlalchemy core that makes sql pythonic without being an ORM?
And it uses SQLAlchemy under the hood. Can use all of it. But if you want full async all the way down, can just use core and something like encode/databases for the DB access.
You can also skip the object serialization from the ORM and work with python dicts directly to significantly improve serialization performance from the database.