[senko]

Indeed, but what Django considers static assets are, with many modern frameworks, build results, not source itself. If you put all the UI bits inside static, you'll either service your JS source files, build config, node_modules and the like, or you'll need to muck around hiding those.

If instead you have a separate project diferctory for the UI bits and then just configure it to use the Django's static folder as the output dir (or alternatively, configure Django to to add the UI build folder in STATICFILES_DIRS), you avoid this pain.