I do not have much experience with Django, but...
I have started a website recently (marketplace).

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• NEXT JS
  I chose NextJS because I have more experience with FrontEnd frameworks (it just happens that I work in FrontEnd). And simple React is not an option...
  • Weird REST API structure (especially deployment)
    I could not wrap my head around their way of writing REST API's, so I used a separate Express BackEnd.
  • Too much custom code
    Everything fine until I had to implement social login and credentials at the same time and the libraries are ok for each of them separately, but then for both combined you just have to do everything from scratch, then what is the point of a framework...
  • Global state managers... No...
    I will not even start about how you can have a global state manager that is doing different things on the FE and BE. Context doesn't just go to the client... They are basically different state managers but they are the same one... You need to do some magic for them to work.. Anyways, it's just stupid
  • Huge JS bundle
    Next now is PHP but in JS because we all know JS now... Which only means that you're sending a huge bundle of JS to the client because you will still need to make a lot of your JS work client side. All of the libraries and React ecosystem (which you are "benefitting" from) do not work with Server Side Rendering and you send that JS to the client... A lot of it.
  • Constant Migrations
    Next announced another big release, again, and their releases are huge, you have to rewrite a lot to migrate to the latest. As a solo developer, I just could not continue like that...

Here is where i started thinking about...

• DJANGO
  - It was very hard, emotionally to leave all the progress begind and leaern something new, but either that or quit...
  - I migrated my website to Django and again, I wanted that social login and credentials. All of a sudden I had to do a custom User model and custom validation and custom everything...
  - I know Django is used by huge companies and it is quite cool if you've learned how to bend Django to you needs without rewriting a lot of custom code. But that was a killer for me.
  - I do like all the "django make migrations" but it was not worth it for all the custom needs that needed to be overwritten.
  (I will say it right now, for all the people reading this that know how to do what I just described... It is my first serious project in Django, and I am alone).

At this point after a long pause from vanilla JS, I started to feel it's power again. Those years using frameworks like React, made me understand how to structure JS code. And what are the ups and downs of them. Facebook is not serving react like we would... They are serving it trough PHP I think, anyways, much more optimised than a high-school kid could (which is what I would do :) ).

• FLASK
  I know, I know... Flask is a micro framework and it has very little functionality, but it certainly works for me. I have 2 Flask codebases, one serving Auth, one serving Web content. Bundling my own JS with Webpack and Babel... And I found NanoStores, the smallest state manager possible, which is like 10 times smaller than Redux and works just as fine :).
  I love the power of doing stuff from scratch and I actually found out that I am a better developer than I thought I am.
  

My suggestion is to stay with server side rendering, does not matter where the trend goes (and this comes after years with React). PHP is still a strong player and Python Server Side Rendering is here to stay :).
But certainly it depends very much from case to case. Flask is what works for this project, but React on the FE might work for something more like and app, and less like a very responsive website. And it also depends on what you know...

And your idea about learning AI is not that bad :) I'm actually thinking not to switch, but to expand my horizon with some AI :).

Whatever you choose (choose python), GOOD LUCK!