That's correct. Around the time that Rails became popular, Django was undergoing a major refactoring to remove "magic" and make its underlying logic more explicit.

Further smaller changes have been made since then for the same purpose: explicit over implicit, code or configuration over convention is part of Django's philosophy.

IMO that also makes it easier to graduate from a beginning to an intermediate level use of the framework because while there are sane defaults in many places, in others you're required to define your specific implementation explicitly from the start. It's a tiny bit more code up front, but all the details are exposed and it's obvious how to override default behavior. And at the same time the framework supports keeping your code reasonably DRY and takes care of much of the tedious, repetitive stuff.

There's still tight coupling in some places (ModelForms, for instance, are arguably part of the controller layer and are tightly coupled to the ORM). But they're reasonably optional (you can use plain Django Forms instead of ModelForms in your views or not use the Forms library at all.)