Hi! Could you please tell me what use cases would nginx be better for, outside of serving static files?

Moreover, having worked with Django a bit (I certainly don't have as much experience as you do), it seems to me that anything that benefits from asynchrony and is trivial in Node is indeed a pain in Django. Good observability is much harder to achieve (tools generally support Node and its asynchrony out of the box, async python not so much), Celery is decent for long running, background, or fire and forget tasks, but e.g. using it to do some quick parallel work, that'd be a simple Promise.all() is much less performant (serialize your args, put it in redis, wait for a worker to pick it up, etc), doing anything that blocks a thread for a little bit, whether in Django or Celery,is a problem, because you've got a very finite amount of threads (unless you use gevent, which patches stdlib, which is a huge smell in itself), and it's easy to run out of them... Sure, you can work around anything, but with Node you don't have to think about any of this, it just works.

When you're still small, isn't taking a week to move to Node a better choice than first evaluating a solution to each problem, implementing solutions, each of which can be more or less smelly (which is something each of your engs will have to learn and maintain... We use celery for this, nginx for that, also gevent here because yada yada, etc etc), which in total might take more days and put a much bigger strain on you in the long term? Whereas with Node, you spend a week, and it all just works in a standard way that everyone understands. It seems to me that exploring other options first would indeed be a better choice, but for a bigger project, not when the rewrite is that small.

Thank you for your answers!