Django is massive and ton of baggage to be carrying if you are only doing REST APIs.
This sounds like standard case going with what developers know instead of evaluating tool for job.
This sounds like standard case going with what developers know instead of evaluating tool for job.
I work on a large Django codebase at work, and this is true right up until you stray from the "Django happy path". As soon as you hit something Django doesn't support, you're back to lego-ing a solution together except you now have to do it in a framework with a lot of magic and assumptions to work around.
It's the normal problem with large and all-encompassing frameworks. They abstract around a large surface area, usually in a complex way, to allow things like a uniform API to caches even though the caches themselves support different features. That's great until it doesn't do something you need, and then you end up unwinding that complicated abstraction and it's worse than if you'd just used the native client for the cache.
I guess if you write a lot of custom code into specific hooks that Django offers or use inheritance heavily it can start to hurt. But at the end of the day, it's just python code and you don't have to use abstractions that hurt you.
Could you be more specific? Don't get me wrong, I'm well aware that npm dependency graph mgmt is a PITA, but curious where you an into a wall w/ Node.
As far as going with what you know vs choosing the best tool for the job, that can be a bit of a balancing act. I generally believe that you should go with what the team knows if it is good enough, but you need to be willing to change your mind when it is no longer good enough.
A company using 2.7 in 2022 is an indicator that the company as a whole doesn't really prioritize IT, or at least the project the OP worked on. By 2017 or so, it should have been clear that whatever dependencies they were waiting on originally were not going to receive updates to support python3 and alternative arrangements should be made.
It got this bad because the whole thing "just worked" in the background without issues. "Don't fix what isn't broken" was the business viewpoint.