Minimizing runtime dependencies is nice, but personally I couldn't care less about build/test time dependencies.
I don't touch Django so can't comment on that though.
Really? I've can't think of a "real" project that did not include 3rd party libs.
Reinventing wheels or struggling with poorer implementations (unittest vs pytest, http vs requests, etc) is huge drain for a project. A huge misstep.
Any one third-party library comes with these drawbacks, and each library must be evaluated individually. Some may be worth the pain (requests, etc.), but many are not. One should try to minimize the number of third-party dependencies one has, not necessarily eliminate them entirely. It’s simply that the lower number of third-party libraries you depend on, the less pain you get of the kinds I listed. Every individual third-party library will have to overcome that threshold by being useful enough. And I doubt that, for most people, pytest is that much better to work with than the built-in unittest is.
