React or Django?

If getting an MVP out of the door is the priority and the future of the company/project depends on timing, then yes. Definitely. Forget about react and go with django and the provided template system. Drop in turbolinks and stimulus or unpoly and be done with it. Focus on the product. If it succeds then you can always split the frontend and do it in React or whatever.

There is no way in this world building a backend + api + react spa is going to be any faster than doing server side templates. Unless you're building the next Google maps.

While exact implementations depend on the site in question Django runs only on the server and React runs only on the browser. Dropping React to only use Django sounds like an airplane designer saying "let's skip adding the propellers for the demo and only install the engines."

(Or is the team saying they only want to emit static HTML or JSON from the server-side? Like I said the architect might be saying something I'm not getting here -- or maybe you might have mis-heard or mis-remembered what was said?)

Thanks everyone for your input. I think I have a better understanding about what's what here.

The dev team wanted to drop React as a frontend layer to save time on development.

We decided to stick with React for frontend since there has been over 40 hours spent on development on it. We'll try to save time by off-loading some features and sign up flows until after the MVP is in public beta. Fingers crossed...

React and Django are two different things.. the former is a client-side UI framework, and the latter is a backend platform for handling requests, accessing the database, etc. A better comparison is React and Vue. or Django and Flask.

IMHO, Vue/Flask is a much lighter pairing to get an MVP up quickly, utilizing SqlAlchemy or PeeWee as a database ORM library.

Django is a batteries included framework. If your developers are familiar with it they can create a MVP fast with it for sure.

Then later (if there is need for that) you can separate the front end and the backend, use django for backend and React or Vue for frontend for example.

But TBH there is not really enough context to know for sure.

Those aren't one-for-one interoperable tools, what it seems they're saying is to focus on the back-end for the MVP and leave some UI polish for later. Django is a way of getting the Pythonic environment all the way up the stack, so your Python devs can make the best use of their time.