SOLVED How to setup dev/stage of a project that uses wsgi?

tl;dr: getting wsgi-related error message after reinstalling OS and recreating Venv with new packages; not sure if my setup makes sense, looking for the examples of how experienced devs set up their projects and help with errors.
Full error traceback: dpaste/rSTr (Python)
Hello there, I’m new, completed+deployed my first project half a year ago, a simple website for an animal sanctuary (fpgsanctuary dot org) built with wagtailCMS which I plan to open-source (since there’s already another sanctuary who’d like to use it). I just reinstalled my windows and proceeded to re-create the venv for the project; at first, I was getting errors due to some pillow dependency issues, so I deleted versions from requirements.txt and let it successfully install all packages. Connected to db, made migrations.
Then, upon running “python manage.py runserver” I got the error which I linked up top.
I would like to ask you to go through my flow and settings and lmk what you think:
I usually develop on master, then when code works, pull master into stage, push to server, run it using cpanel, test there, then push to prod and run it in cpanel.
For simple fixes though, I’ve been developing and pushing on stage, and had no problem running local server (now I do, that error is on stage as well as master).
I do have 3 separate folders locally (for master, stage and prod) and just open them in IDE instead of using “git branch” just so I have 3 different venvs set up and not worry when something goes terribly wrong.
I’ve been away from python for a few months and have a hard time understanding whether I should be using the exact same setup locally that I use on server, or whether I should be using same DB, or especially whether WSGI settings should be ignored/disconnected on dev, but one thing for sure - I did run it using “runserver” and it worked on all branches.
When I run “runserver” on stage, I get almost the same traceback:
Here are my settings/base.py, settings/dev.py , settings/stage.py. traceback from runserver on stage, wsgi.py from stage:
dpaste/GZ5Y (Python)
Thanks for reading this far and have a great day, any comments are wellcome.

huh, apparently I just had to delete this line, since wagtail changed the way things are done.

“wagtail.core.middleware.SiteMiddleware”.