I used Inertia years ago, pretty sure vite wasn't a thing at the time. You can try to blame me if you want, I don't mind, there's a chance hot-reloading would have been possible with more time commitment. At the time, there was only one (unofficial) Django app for Inertia support and it required some fiddling and enhancements to even get working. Ultimately I think I just have solutions to the problems it solves that I prefer and won't be looking back.

It's worse because the frontend people working on the app all had experience with the React stuff you mention but none of the special Django or Inertia stuff we had to do to make it work. Also it was much easier to find glue code online for those solutions at the time.