Been reading a lot of these "why do you use X stack" threads lately, and figured I'd throw my own experience in.
I started out doing the typical thing — Django backend, React frontend, separate API, the whole SPA setup. It worked, but honestly? For most of the projects I actually ship (small business tools, internal dashboards, the occasional client site), it felt like massive overkill. I was spending more time managing state between two codebases than actually building features.
About a year ago I switched to Django + htmx for anything that isn't a genuinely complex frontend, and it's honestly been kind of a relief. No build step, no juggling two deploy pipelines, no "wait why is this data stale on the client." Django just renders the HTML, htmx swaps it in, done. It feels a bit like going back in time, but in a good way — less moving parts, less debugging surface area.
I still reach for a proper JS framework when a project actually needs rich client-side interactivity (like a drag-and-drop builder I did last year — htmx would've been painful for that). But I've noticed I default to "do I really need a SPA for this?" before reaching for React now, and the answer is "no" way more often than I expected.
Curious if anyone else has gone the "boring tech" route on purpose, or if you tried it and went back?
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