If it were up to me there'd be a way to completely disable it globally for all models. Let me explicitly enable it when I'm just shelling around or checking results in unit tests. It is not a feature for production environments.
Laravel does this (or at least has a config for it). You can disable lazy loading in non-production environments which will throw fatal errors whenever a model is lazy loaded.
The nice part is, in prod, that code _allows_ lazy loading since application stability is more important. Hopefully at that point you have a good performance monitoring tool that will alert you to that problem. Laravel also has hooks to more granularly fire events about lazy loading if you want to roll your own notification solution.
So I disagree with your assertion. Lazy loading is ONLY for production. While it is possible that such a feature could potentially bring down your DB server and therefor your app in general, if the feature is turned off locally, then hopefully you’re catching it well ahead of time. And if you’re running small app with no users, meh. For large apps, hopefully your team’s standards are enough to keep the monsters at bay.
Lazy loading is a sharp knife that requires skill to use appropriately.
Hmm I would call lazy loading the opposite of a sharp knife that requires skill.. you're not being explicit about database work. You're relying on the framework to bail you out where you've forgotten a fetch. And by default Django will do that silently so missing prefetches easily go undiscovered.
