alt Hacker NewsNow I've been dabbling outside of Django, I realised some of those things come from bits people don't think about much:
INSTALLED_APPS and other bits in the settings provide a central registration point, from there the system where a project is made up of apps is enabled.
Each app, has it's own migrations, models, templates and static files.
This enables the whole ecosystem of parts that's easy to add, and makes it easy to toggle things (e.g. enabling the django-debug-toolbar only on your dev and local instance).
In the outside world of Flask, Fast API etc - things hang together much more loosely and it means the integration just isn't as complete.
This manifests itself in 1,000 little papercuts that make things take longer.
It can be similar to WordPress plugins, but as problematic as WordPress plugins are, they went a lot farther in terms of ecosystem. While stored in the database, the WordPress plugins do the equivalent of INSTALLED_APPS, calling the code to register them.
Someone tried to make an ecosystem of Django apps, called Pinax, and it was pretty nice, but didn't pick up that much market share.