Django is a framework and thus you have a lot of builtin functionality, which can be restrictive if you need to stray from what the framework prescribes.

Node.js is simply the runtime like "Python" or "Php". Without leveraging frameworks written to run on Node (just as Django is a framework written to run on Python), you have the freedom to build from scratch, however cumbersome that may be.

I have not kept up with Django since it's 1.2 release many years ago, but I remember working with their Data model a pain if you needed to use a NoSQL database, for example. Also, I found signals fairly annoying to work with. These things may no longer be an issue. Django was one of the more complete (and thus complex) frameworks I've ever worked with and I have not run across as robust of a framework for Node.js

If you are writing python and just need a REST api to serve data, I have been enjoying working with Fast API with Pydantic typing. It would be comparable to running Fastify or Next.js API endpoints with TypeScript on Node.js.