Agreed. But as soon as you hit any dynamic behavior, you kind of end up wishing you could "drop" into React.

That's why I built the following project: https://github.com/silviogutierrez/reactivated

It's very early on, but essentially, completely replaces the template rendering with React components. Still regular markup, but whenever you need dynamic behaviors, it's trivial. And it's all server side rendered.

So basically, looking at https://github.com/silviogutierrez/reactivated/blob/master/c...

You can see the traditional Django context becomes "Props" in the top level component. Then it's React all the way down.

Notes:

1. The most complicated part is the initial setup. You do need to run NodeJS, webpack + Django server. Working on improving that.

2. I like TypeScript and use it here. But theoretically it'll be optional. The Django+Python part is also statically typed using MyPy.

3. No instructions whatsoever yet. But you can see a live site using this stack here: https://www.silviogutierrez.com/ . Notice it's server rendered but has dynamic behaviors that are trivial in React but harder with jQuery + Django. Example: https://www.silviogutierrez.com/blog/making-cck-fields-read-... Look at the nested commenting and moving the form around. Very easy in React.

4. Because of the architecture, adding a much-better-turbolinks style Ajax is trivial. Click around the site above (loading indicator not yet added). The page is re-rendered entirely on the client but gets a server AJAX response.

Hope that's interesting info. If you'd like to try it out, definitely let me know. Once you overcome the setup hurdles, it's amazingly productive. As in, if all you wish to do is `{{ form }}` like old school Django, here's the equivalent sample template: https://github.com/silviogutierrez/reactivated/blob/master/c...