I always wonder about signals. I found them incredibly attractive from a code cleanliness standpoint, but every team I’ve joined avoided them either because they got burnt by them or because of superstition from blog posts by people who got burnt by them. It may be a cognitive load thing, that in smaller codebases it’s easy enough to remember “these three things fire a signal when saved”, but bites you in the ass when trying to make a quick patch for a bug in production late in the day because a customer called up screaming.

I do understand the "invisible side effects" side. I do try to be conservative in what I do in signal listeners.

I do what I must in the atomic context, and trigger celery tasks for everything else.