JS has its uses. Once in a while I see a site which actually needs it and makes proper use of it. Much rarer, I have to develop such a site myself. But generally, I hark back to ancient times when websites meant html and css. When I do need a dose of JS, I usually go with something raw, or the unfashinable jQuery. I abhor the thought of JS in the backend.

Html and css always via Pug and Sass.

Out back, I really, really like minimalism, usually in the form of a single executable made with Nim. Static link whenever possible, so I can just bang the thing unto anything linuxish. For a reasonably low-volume site (meaning 99.9% of all sites), I go with SQLite for data. Yes, there'll be shouts of outrage that I shouldn't do it. These I know I can safely ignore, but keep my code clean and simple and easily portable to Postgresql if the should occasionally arise.

Sometimes I need easy access to every library function ever written, so I'll drop the purity and go Python. Bottle or Cherrypy is what like to build on, then.

No matter what, these days run the whole thing behind a Caddy server and be done with any headaches over configs and https.

I realise, of course, that I am completely out of whack with current general consensus. So be it. My stuff works, and works fast, and I can cram amazing amount of it into a fairly low-end VPS.