Is there a better way to load Django static directories for multiple apps than this? Thank you

A better practice is to put all your static files in the same folder in your root directory instead of each app:

# ...
├── app1
├── app2
├── project
├── manage.py
├── media
├── requirements.txt
├── static
│   ├── css
│   ├── icons
│   ├── img
│   ├── js
│   └── vendor

Then in your settings.py assign this variable:

STATICFILES_DIRS = [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'static'), ]

staticfiles_dirs sets the directory and tells Django where to look up for your static files, in this example, our folder is named 'static' in our root directory, os.path.join will join the base directory(root) with static.

BTW STATIC_ROOT is usually used in a production environment, when you run 'collectstatic` command, all static files including your 3rd party apps will be copied to this 'staticfiles' folder.

Also, you can put templates of each app into the same folder in a similar way:

# root 
└── templates
    ├── app1
    ├── app2
    ├── app3
    ├── base.html
    └── index.html

And in your settings.py, add the directory of 'templates' folder.

TEMPLATES = [
    {
        'BACKEND': 'django.template.backends.django.DjangoTemplates',
        'DIRS': [os.path.join(BASE_DIR, 'templates')],
        'APP_DIRS': True,
        'OPTIONS': { # ...
            ],
        },
    },
]

Personally, I think this would be much cleaner.

You can reference my project for the file structure: here

I recommend to serve static files from Django project root directory as shown below. *My answer explains how to load CSS and JavaScript files in Django in detail:

django-project
 |-core
 |  └-settings.py
 |-my_app1
 |-my_app2
 |-static # Here
 |  └-my_app1
 |     |-css
 |     |  └-hello.css
 |     └-js
 |        └-hello.js
 |
 └-templates
    └-index.html

Then, set BASE_DIR / 'static/' to STATICFILES_DIRS in settings.py as shown below:

# "settings.py"

STATIC_URL = 'static/'
STATIC_ROOT = 'staticfiles/'
STATICFILES_DIRS = [
    BASE_DIR / 'static/' # Here
]