Direction out of touch with the importance of cultural well-being. At this point I'm not accepting talks with companies that do that and point them to their online onboarding and processes. If they are so lonely that they value what they see more than the work done then I have other companies and other priorities.
When I read things like that it pulls me away even further from continuing CS. How blind are you that you do not realise that forcing a software execution is not ransomeware ?
I'll tell you what's wrong here : Docker is a fantastic technology but it simply couldn't find a suitable market tactic.
Now it resolves to this shitty practices. I don't even know how you can begin to think that it would add ANY burden to them NOT to run the update on your computer.
And here is my problem : It's my computer, I decide what is ran on it or not.
Next day we have some idiot getting keys on the docker update system and we simply have built a technologic crash because suddenly nobody can decide wether that update is ran or not.
Keeping control away of the user is the most stupid thing there is.
I've got another one : It's your device, you shouldn't be locked out of it because of some update that now requires you to authenticate to whatever online service they have the fantastic idea of coming up with.
The most stupid thing I can think of is that the downloader changes version less often that the said software. So you download your "downloader" which points you to the latest version of the software.
Not related to this, but I got locked out of my apple account few days ago, this means : loose of everything I bought, cannot update any software. Only way to retrieve said account was trough a SMS system that was locked on a non mobile phone. They nicely allowed me after to use my email account for it (which was already linked), and promptly asked me to a new number.
To my surprise, this account status went back to it's original state (which mean I STILL have to re-do all of this process) and I'm still locked out of it.
But they took my money, they took my phone number. And they are happily locking me out every few because they basically do wtf they want.
I'm not buying any apple product anymore and I'm making sure everybody I know about knows about it. This company is a lie. These people are doing racketing in day light.
Microsoft has trouble with UI design and it only got worse. Think about the "help" buttons that are on win system preferences, instead of directing you to the option they send you to google or bing. It's ridiculous.
fun fact comment, Asimov thought about this, I'm quoting the short part that is relevant from this article on wikipedia :https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foundation_series
"One key feature of Seldon's theory, which has proved influential in real-world social science,[3] is the uncertainty principle: if a population gains knowledge of its predicted behavior, its self-aware collective actions become unpredictable."
You are making judgments about OP using Docker. But from my point of view you are a true pain to work with because you do not containerise your work. Anytime I'd have to work with one of your creations I'd have to go figure what you are using, set it up and make sure it works. That's a waste of time and you are promoting that very fact because you were unable to figure any usage for it. I doubt OP has only "read some blog post about it somehwere" It's literally wide in usage by a lot of companies. "People who like Docker often seem to be working in larger teams, which is totally fine and they're probably right to use Docker." -> it's actually about that, it is useful is scaling that's true, but it's also very useful just to share the env your software should work with. And I'd dare to say that giving a Dockerfile is now standard practice.
"Just use the same Python version and a roughly similar PostgreSQL version in development and production, and you're good to go" -> And that's more time than it would take to re-use that Dockerfile and docker-compose that i literally wrote once and go to once in a while.
Having a React / Vue whatever in addition to your Django server allow you to split the "View" from the "Model-View-Control" paradigm that Django respect, when you have django & react, Django is only "MC" and react becomes "V"
Simply put, when you are in the template paradigm you are producing HTML files, when you are using React you are generating HTML.
For instance, I'm not building up an "account" page, i'm building up a "detail" page that can be reused with a query that I'm passing in. That query is a function that defines the call to Django. Eventually I'm passing parameters to the component to drive it's behaviour.
I'd simply suggest you to go learn some react, it is difficult and it takes time, but it will allow you to see more solutions to problems that you might be handling in the "industrial" way (eg: writing 10 templates and having some jquery mixxed in the html)
I've been working with django and react for a while now, and i'm now used to 100% coverage without much hassle and very good productivity (dare I cite my boss :) )
"I don't want to go full SPA with Django as this defeats the purpose of Django IMO" -> What is this "purpose" ? Django is here to help me model my database, handle few permissions and bring few API up online, I see no problem with having a PWA in front of it. Are you trying to get all of your website server rendered ? In which case you could do that without having to worry about integrating it with Django... TBH after 5 years of react and 8 of Django, i'm just not mixxing them up except for the front-end calling a query on the back-end (which both can be served at the same domain using nginx) ;
Honestly in the real world you would generally already know if the need expressed is meant to be a web service (for instance) and if it requires a database - and in those cases, most framework already propose an sqlite / fully-fleged database in the same code.
If we already know that a database might be required later then using something like sqlite straight is smart move that would allow you to write code that is instantly going to work when you actually need something fully fledged instead of re-writing it.
Knowing if you need a database or not is simply one of the first things you know, and writing code before setting that up is a waste of time or a learning process.
Simplicity is what strikes the brightest of minds, some prefer to have simple shortcuts and a tone of sh*tware that prevent the user from knowing how to use it's tools (git, configuring an IDE), some prefer to have something they can master over the years, is standard in the industry, and that doesn't induce tons of un-controlled behaviours.