The lack of support for this functionality makes it impossible to use the Django backend with any project that either needs to modify a column in the future, or depends on third-party apps with migrations that modify indexed columns.

I'm quite disappointed that I spent time modifying my project only for it to fail. These limitations really should be called out someplace prominent. There is no mention at https://www.cockroachlabs.com/docs/stable/deploy-app-gcr.html.

Is any work being done on this ?
What can Django developers do to get this issue prioritized ?

We are hard at work to rewrite the entire schema change infrastructure to make this possible. I'm hopeful we'll be able to address this, at least for cases where the schema change is not run as part of an explicit transaction (BEGIN; ...; COMMIT), in 23.1 (Spring '23). Until all of the schema changes are implemented in the new schema changer, due to the need to know when the transaction starts which implementation to use, we'll not be using the new infrastructure by default.

Any progress on this? I just encountered this and fear that this is a problem that I will have to move for.

@ajwerner
Could you please provide an updated timeline?

I changed Charfield to TextField and it worked fine, Hope this helps :)