[Tabular-Iceberg]

> but I'm genuinely curious how the real software development practitioners would approach an open ended task like this

I just panic and procrastinate. Some of us never grow out of that.

But that aside, pick one of the mature traditional "batteries included" web frameworks to get started. It's never going to be the ideal architecture, but it's not going to be an awful one either. Really learn how to use it, and keep the code quality high from the start. Too many projects I've worked on have ended up in a deep hole because people decided to try a whole new tech stack in production without actually learning how to use it first. Learning by doing is great and all, but there will always be a pressure to "just ship it" instead of reworking all the beginner mistakes that will eventually come back and bite you down the line.

[star_juice]

Technical debt is a made up problem and cannot hurt you :,(

All of this is entirely fair and worth considering, given pretty much all mature frameworks do tend to have some extension or build out option to make them "scalable" as far as I can tell. Now to choose one that's not Django, which I've heard is a bit of a nightmare for this sort of building out (but maybe more because of the problems you mentioned than anything wrong with the framework itself?)

[Tabular-Iceberg]

I think any framework that has been deployed at scale is going to have people saying it's a nightmare. But very few people have deployed comparable applications in different frameworks at a comparable scale. With only one data point you can't really draw any conclusions.

It's a different matter if you can argue from a specific technical feature of a framework that makes it unsuitable. I don't know Django, so I don't know if anything like that applies to it. For now I think you should focus on finding something, anything, that's both enjoyable to work with, and lets you focus more on developing your business than worrying about architecture or menial implementation details.

[star_juice]

So a lot of the scalability complaints arise from the fact it's written in Python, but as far as I can tell they're largely newer developers trying to grow some web app they made rather than people presenting at PyCon about why it's awful. Fortunately I am not trying to bootstrap a business from this thread, but I agree that it's far better to spend a few weeks getting my hands dirty with some framework or language that I'm familiar with than just reading about all the cool things I can do in some other language or framework that I need to still learn.