[PhoenixReborn]

The ORM works pretty well as long as you only need to do pretty basic CRUD queries, though I do agree that it gets much worse as your queries get more complex.

Serializers are definitely one of the worst parts of DRF. Anecdotally, I used Pydantic (instead of Marshmallow as the author recommends) to get around this.

[ensignavenger]

I use pydantic for serializers in Django too- and recently started experimenting with Django Ninja https://django-ninja.rest-framework.com/ if you haven't seen it already.