[Answered ]-Can I return a response in a function within a view function?

The short answer is that you can’t do it there directly because the calling function still has to do something with the return value from get_record_for_model. That said, I would recommend that you do something like the below, which sends data as well as a found/not found boolean back to the calling function:

def get_record_from_model(model, **kwargs):
    try:
        return model.objects.get(**kwargs), True

    except model.DoesNotExist:
        error_data = copy.copy(settings.ERROR["NOT_EXIST_ERR"])
        return error_data, False

...

def bar(request):
    ...
    data, found = get_record_from_model(model, **kwargs)
    if not found:
        return JsonResponse(data, status=404)
    ...
    return JsonResponse(response_data)

Use django’s built-in shortcut get_object_or_404

from django.shortcuts import get_object_or_404

def bar(request):
    ...
    record = get_object_or_404(model, **kwargs)
    ...
    return JsonResponse(data_to_response)