The controls were only visible on hover (don't get me started--I did bring that up), which I didn't mention in the article because it wasn't relevant to the technical issues I was trying to solve. You can argue whether a ul was the right way to code it, but the markup I saw that they were going to replace what I built with was loads and loads of nested divs.

The point of using Django was to "take advantage" of normal form posting. As soon as you start adding a lot of JavaScript, you have a SPA, whether you're using a framework or not. If you're doing vanilla JS, then you do have a lot of questions of where that JS should live and how it should be brought into the file that aren't even questions.

And, again, there's the issue that if you build infrastructure with the assumption you won't need to use a framework, when you get to where you need one you have a lot of fast talking to do to convince stakeholders to give you time to change direction.