Django is lovely, but it uses so much Python magic, so much metaclass chicanery, that if you try to use it moderately differently you'll hit roadblocks.
Been using Django for long but I consider its ergonomics to be quiet ugly from class based mixin views to models and forms being two separate things among others.
That is certainly true, both for Django it self and the Django Rest Framework. If you try to fight Django on how you use it, you're going to have a bad time.
One trick I use when working of Django projects is to look at my code and think: Am I writing too much code? If you have a method that more than 15 - 20 lines, you're most likely doing something wrong.