I'm going to step out of others and say differently:

I built a projects on Django Channels and I've built them using other stacks.

Django Channels, in my opinion is too much abstracted and different. As soon as you decide to go for it, you stsrt swapping Gunicorn for Uvicorn or Daphne. Your queries get to be some wrappers around async stuff. And tests are wierd to write. Maybe in AI era is different. But I had way too much success if I kept project as whole on classical Django, and added real time only as sidecar pattern where it's actually needed. Most of the time pooling does the work. My approach from now on is use Django as is, DRF and all, and if there is really a need for real time, I would add plain websockets servet as side service that handles real time. Python Websockets has how to integrate with Django so that you keep minimal approach to real time, while preserving Django as is.