maybe a wrong choice of wording but "disabling migrations and enabling fake migrations" REALLY turns out to be activated with migrate=True, fake_migrate=True.
migrate=False short-circuits at the highest level any migration logic, and it's the fastest "mode" to use on production, when you're - usually - sure that the model described in python and your backend are completely in-sync.
tl;dr: migrate=False automatically discards any value you give to fake_migrate. Same applies for migrate and fake_migrate_all at the DAL() instantiation.