[salsakran]

Not sure I agree with fat models being a "rarely seen, alternative code organization strategy".

It's a natural state which most django codebases tend towards. There's a natural Views use ModelForms use Models data flow which leads to bloat somewhere in that chain as you add code. Fat models are easiest to test and the natural place to put most things, but eventually massive models get unwieldly and you start putting things into helpers. The core thing the author seems to have conflate util functions that have access to a request and helpers that have no connection to the request/response cycle.

[jscn]

In my experience, fat models are the most common approach to organising code in Django projects. As another comment stated, it's better than having fat views, but it's not ideal.