I don't know your job, your coworkers or your context. You may be right… probably not, though. React is a powerhouse in terms of developer productivity.
I have 17 years of software engineering behind me, and while I dabbled in a lot of things, most of these years have been spent using Python (and Django). And the current typescript+react ecosystem is several orders of magnitude more productive than anything else I've ever used, be it in Python or any other language.
You say "overcomplication", but React is far, far simpler than Django's template system. You're basically throwing away a LOT of overly complex shit that is simply there to generate HTML in non-html. React generates HTML with actual HTML -- well, okay, JSX/TSX is not technically HTML, but it maps perfectly where it needs to, and still gives you that added layer of typing for extra safety. React can't generate invalid HTML, and if your app compiles, you won't ever have a client-side syntax error.
I can't stress how bad a tool Django templates are for the job of generating HTML.
Oh and JS without React? I mean, sure, if you're literally just adding a couple of dynamic elements on a mostly static site. If you're actually going to have JS-driven UI elements in a dynamic interface, just use React. Not saying you have to, but it's probably the correct choice.
There's a lot of purists out there who will cry foul at 50kb more of some gzipped code, but do you want to spend your time tweaking and manually testing imperative UI behaviour for all your little widgets and how they interact with each other, or do you want to be productive?
Feel free to email me more context on your situation and I can give you a more specific assessement … but my €.02 here is, spend some time learning react & typescript, and playing with the more useful bits of it (NextJS+Typescript). It's not time that will be wasted either way. Give it a week and re-assess.