[samwillis]

Yes, exactly, I agree there are valid arguments against active record, partially at scale. However, I believe, certainly when starting out on a new project/startup, sticking with the standard recommendations and patterns provided in the docs for Django and DRF you make life much easer for on boarding new people to the project later on - they will have seen it all before.

If you get big enough where the standard patterns don't work anymore, YAY! you got big, celebrate! Then start looking at how to refactor for easer maintainability for your specific use case and scale.

[regularfry]

The problem I tend to see is that the refactoring never happens. Instead the system becomes the legacy mess nobody wants to work on and eventually it gets replaced. If you get lucky, it'll be replaced by the people who wrote the first version, but it's more likely to be replaced by a team who weren't there when the first one was built, who will build it in this-year's-shiny, without learning the fundamental lessons of why the first version ended up that way so doom the next version to a similar fate.