I'm in your same situation and I think it really depends on your use case. Are you creating an API that's read-only and only for you or a small internal team? Y

I'm in your same situation and I think it really depends on your use case. Are you creating an API that's read-only and only for you or a small internal team? You could pretty easily write that in just about any framework (or even no framework at all). Once you start adding on features like allowing writes, authentication+authorization, rate limiting, API discovery, client library generation, OAuth support, etc then something like DRF really makes sense. DRF is pretty darn flexible and it uses Django so you get a lot of functionality for free, including the Django admin if you want a way to explore your data. DRF in no way forces you to use the Django models (or even any models at all).