I'm sort of fascinated by the resilience of the Django admin. It's nearly 20 years old at this point and really hasn't changed too much since I first used it in 2007. I've always thought it was a good example of what having a strong designer early in your project life-cycle can do.
I am strongly considering django for the next side project. I am new to python but enjoy it’s low ceremony approach (you sort of forget what language you are using, it gets out of the way) and then django to have more bases covered including this admin. Then htmx to avoid JS, maybe Elm if it needs interactivity
every time i start a project with something other than django, i end up with django, but "homebrewed".
example: you start with flask. you need auth, so you add flask-login.
you need some database access, so you add SQLAlchemy (and its flask plugin). you also need some kind of admin page, so you add flask-admin.
when you are finished, you have a flask-django framework, but not as well integrated -- with django, you get ALL of those all of those out-of-the-box, everything is well oiled and well integrated.
so, yeah, imho django is an amazing backend framework that does its job perfectly, specially when you add some really good libraries (like django-rest-framework).