is Django working towards using native types instead of all they stuff they invented before type hints existed?
Moving to a Pydantic-style model would be a whole different ballgame. Hell of a lot of work, and meanwhile we can’t even really get to “let’s have type hints in some of the Django infernals”.
But! I do think someone who wants to have fun could try to build a type hint based Model subclass as a third party lib! There’s a looooot of stuff to resolve in that world but for any proposal like that the general vibe is “prove the feasibility with a third party package first”.
It's essentially what you described and it's growing in popularity.
At the end of the day I end up writing a service layer over everything so I'm not super bugged by most of this. But it's busywork when first starting up a project.