Having spend over a decade in Python backend/JS frontend ecosystems at this point, I can confidently say from my experience that Django backends are much easier

Having spend over a decade in Python backend/JS frontend ecosystems at this point, I can confidently say from my experience that Django backends are much easier to update than React frontends. If you import every bleeding-edge nonsense through pip that you can, there can still be problems, but Python has a better culture around this, so it's usually easy to steer teams away from doing this. In JS, importing every bleeding-edge nonsense through npm that you can is the only culture I've found, and this problem is pervasive enough that even guarding your direct dependencies doesn't isolate you from it, since your dependencies are likely to introduce bad dependencies of their own.