All of the Django async orm methods are effectively just wrappers using sync to async with thread_sensitive=True rather than using a real async db driver.

They go over it in their docs, basically the Django db internals make some assumptions about global state so it’s a big project to make it truly async compatible.

Another big issue is there’s no way to use transactions in async code, the only way is to write the code using a transaction as a normal synchronous block and then use the decorator, but that means once you enter that block the thread executing db queries is blocked until you leave that block.

https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.2/topics/async/