I was stuck in this error until I changed the version of the DLL file to the newest version that is available now (310). Then I got another error after running some requests:

ERROR 2025-02-26 12:19:28,218 libgdal GDAL_ERROR 1: b'PROJ: proj_create_from_database: C:\OSGeo4W\share\proj\proj.db contains DATABASE.LAYOUT.VERSION.MINOR = 2 whereas a number >= 4 is expected. It comes from another PROJ installation.'

The issue occurred because I was installing using the advanced installer which was for some reasons insisting to install multiple PROJ versions which were confusing the script (although I was picking just one gdal version to be installed).

So the solution was to:

1. uninstall OsGeoW4 totally
2. reinstall it using the express installer with only the 'gdal' package checked
3. verifying it was installed using (gdalinfo --version)
4. Then updating the settings.py file with the new version dll file (gdal310.dll)