I don't think that many people care about server-side templating anymore. Some excellent JS frameworks has done away with that.
PJAX is a great compromise between the two approaches: https://github.com/jacobian/django-pjax https://readthedocs.org/projects/django-easy-pjax/
Some of us, however, make websites. We generally render our HTML server side. And Django templates are as good a way as any other (leaving aside speed concerns).