> I remember when I was getting started with Django in the 0.9
I can confirm that that was the general mindset back then, and I think that's what made the project last for 20 years. I myself ended up doing some monkey-patching for the admin interface on 0.92 (or 0.91? it's been a lot of time since then), all as the result of me going through the source-code. Definitely not the cleanest solution, even back then, but it made one getting to know the underlying code so much more.
Someone in an IRC channel I'm in (recently! It's still alive!) asked if I fancied taking a look at some Django code for them because they'd been asked to find a contractor to modernise it and make it suitable for 2025 hosting.
Sure, I thought, this'll be fun.
Holy shit. It was something I'd started working on in the aforementioned 0.9x days, and which someone else had, uh, "extended and modified" after I left the web dev place where I'd worked at the time. Remarkably it was still pretty understandable.
I didn't want anything to do with the person that ran the site, not even just to take money off them, so I passed on it.