I recently upgraded two ~10 year old aging legacy applications at work. One was in Flask, and one in Django. This made me appreciate the "batteries included" philosophy of Django a lot more.
Even though the django legacy application was much larger, it had barely any extensions to "vanilla django". Comparably, the flask application had a dozen third-party flask-* dependencies that provided functionality like auth, permissions, and other features that Django has built-in. Many of these dependencies were archived/abandonware and hadn't been maintained in a decade.
When it came to upgrading the Django app, I had one giant release notes page to read. I didn't need to switch any packages, just make some pretty simple code changes for clearly documented deprecations. For the Flask app I had to read dozens of release notes pages, migrate to new maintained packages, and rework several untested features (see: legacy application).
In my mind, "batteries included" is an underrated philosophy of Djangoo. Also, it is now such a mature ecosystem it is unlikely there will be any radical breaking changes.
Perhaps there are some parallels to draw with newer trendy (but minimalistic) python frameworks like FastAPI.
If I were building a web application I wanted to last a decade or more, Django would be up there in tech choices - boring and sensible, but effective.
I haven't used Django in about 10 or 12 years but I cracked it open the day. It was cool to see all the things I loved are largely unchanged; I was able to step right back in.
The ecosystem has improved thought. django-ninja is great for API, django-coton brings component supports and you have better options than celery for qeueing.
There is buzz around the combination of Django and HTMX, worked on by the same people in one team, as a much simpler alternative to split frontend and backend teams with a REST API in between (and perhaps NextJS as well, etc).
