This seems overly complex to me. They have their settings in a .env file, they have a separate program/script that loads those settings into the environment va

This seems overly complex to me. They have their settings in a .env file, they have a separate program/script that loads those settings into the environment variables, then they have another program that reads them out of the environment and parses them into python objects in settings.py... so why not just put them in settings.py to begin with? I have also never agreed with the common suggestion of putting secrets into env vars- I believe secrets belong in something like Hashicorp's Vault and stored on the running system using proper OS level access control.