> Continuously failing external requests should not make each one of your responses slow.
It is not really a matter of the responses becoming slow, the problem is that if you are running sync with i.e 6 application server processes and you have just 6 hits on an endpoint in your app that is hung up on an external API call your application stops processing requests altogether.
Exactly this. I see the whole django async stuff being far more relevant for applications with lots of traffic or high request rates where you are already running on beefy infrastructure with a ton of workers and any small improvement in performance translates into huge real world cost savings. Your standard blog, no so much.
You should add something like https://pypi.org/project/circuitbreaker/
Continuously failing external requests should not make each one of your responses slow.