I'm with you on this, Django + HTMX + Vanilla JS (where needed) just works which is a beautiful thing.

Is building out the UI clunkier with Django templates than with JSX? Absolutely.

But not having to worry about both server and client side state is such a time saver and you know it is going to continue to work.

For the past few years I've been using Go (using Gin) in place of Django, and it works nicely and is quite a bit faster. However, recently I've been toying around with Django again, thinking about making it my default for new projects because it really does take care of so much that you'd otherwise have to deal with yourself.