is this like the "it takes 50 hours to set up a project management tool to work the way you want"? what happens if you onboard a superstar that works with django some other way?

No. Django is very good at having the autogenerated/default stuff be consistent with what you do if you want to write manually, it's not one of those "if you want to use the magic as-is it all just works, if you want to customize even one tiny piece you have to manually replicate all of the magic parts" frameworks.

Either way the end result is a single file in migrations/ that describes the change, though you do have to write it with Django's API if you want further migrations to work without issues (so no raw SQL, but this low-level API is things like CreateTable() and AddColumn() - and is what Django generates automatically from the models, so the auto-generated migrations are easily inspectable and won't change).

> what happens if you onboard a superstar that works with django some other way

If you hired a "superstar" that goes out of their way to hand-write migrations in cases where Django can do it by default (the majority of them) you did not in fact get a superstar.

I have yet to see anyone hand-roll migrations on purpose. In fact the problem is usually the opposite, the built-in migration generator works so well that a lot of people have very little expertise is doing manual migrations because they maybe had to do it like 5 times in their entire career.