As someone who has used DRF in many projects over a decade, I 100% agree. In my current project I’m using django-ninja which gives me the power of the Django ecosystem and ORM with the simplicity of FastAPI. This is the way.
For me personally I think the micro approach of Ninja / FastAPI is at odds with what I want out of DRF. I just want to make my crud stuff and not worry about implementing e.g. throttling, etc, on my own.
Also, I think the comparison is unfair due to the sheer age of DRF. Check out this graph: https://star-history.com/#encode/django-rest-framework&vital... Then click the "align timelines" and you see that ninja is more popular than DRF was at the same age.
Also, most business fail way before their chosen framework stops being maintained. In fact, most businesses fail before they even got their first customer, let alone getting to break even. We need to keep some perspective here.