I remember watching a beautiful talk from some pycon whose details I can’t remember about using django as if it was a micro-framework.

It basically boils down to rejecting the folder structure that django-admin sets up for you, importing stuff yourself and doing some basic initialisation/configuration.

Once you do that, django kinda somehow behaves like a micro-framework, with the significant difference that you can import and use the advanced features if you want/need to.