Does Django's singleton architecture make it unworkable as a standalone ORM in a library?

I like the Django ORM. It's simple, easy to use, and reasonably powerful.

I'm currently developing some internal sites for the VFX company I work for, for which I've used Django. In the meantime, we are developing other python applications and libraries to be used in various contexts in production. There's a number of places in which our core library needs to be interacting with some databases, and using an ORM like Django would really help things. I'm aware of other options like SqlAlchemy or PeeWee, but I'd like to see if Django will work since I use it on the websites and I like its API better.

Using Django as an ORM in a library is tricky (as I explored in a previous question), because Django expects to be used as a website with "apps". In a library, I might want to define any number of data models, which would exist in appropriate places in the library but not inside any Django app (as we're not using any other parts of the framework). So far so good.

I can create a baseclass for my models anywhere in the library as follows:

from django.db import models
from django.apps import apps
import django.conf

django.conf_settings.configure(
    DATABASES = ...
)

apps.populate((__name__,))

class LibModel(models.Model):
    class Meta:
        abstract = True
        app_label = __name__

Then anywhere in the library I can create my own models with this baseclass. Since I'm not relying on the "app" for the database names, I need to state them explicitly.

class SpecificModel(LibModel):
    # fields go here
    class Meta(LibModel.Meta):
        db_table = "specific_model_table_name"

This gets around my concern of having to simulate the structure of an "app". The name property in the base class supplies Django with all it needs, and then Django quits whining about not finding an app. The other model files can live wherever they want.

However, there is a glaring use case where this all falls apart. Say that my Django web application wants to use some functionality from the company core python library, which now uses the Django ORM for various things. Since I make a call to django.conf.settings.configure in the library, Django is going to scream about defining the settings more than once when it tries to run the main application.

So basically, a library using the Django ORM is incompatible with Django. Wonderful.

Is there any way around this? I mean, it's a lovely ORM - is it really this impossible to use in a standalone modular way? Is the Django architecture utterly singleton in nature, making this impossible?

*Not a duplicate I'm trying to have a company python library that uses Django as an ORM. Some of the things that could depend on it might be Django websites themselves. How do I get around Django's singleton insistence on only setting the settings config once? Or is it possible? None of these answers address this!

from Does Django's singleton architecture make it unworkable as a standalone ORM in a library?