The grass is always greener... over the years I've built stuff with Perl, PHP, node.js, Ruby/Rails, Elixir/Phoenix, and Go. Each felt good at the time, but it's easy to get overwhelmed over the latest hyped frameworks and libraries. Don't like Typescript or Webpack? Nobody's forcing you to use them, you can still use node.js.

Tried and true principles and architectures will outlive any libraries. Remember, React is only 6 years old, do you think new projects will use React in another 6 years? Remember Meteor framework that was all the rage 7 years ago? I don't know anyone using it for new projects. It's the natural cycle of development. Don't get emotional about frameworks.

If anything, build _your own framework_. I don't mean a competitor to React or whatnot, but your own set of tools that can be reused over time across projects. Back in the days before jQuery, people were doing DOM manipulation themselves and everyone built their own wrappers around the DOM. Nowadays, I notice too many people reach for a framework without thinking about what they even want to accomplish.

At the end of the day, "best" is always subjective, relative to your own experience and expectations. For what it's worth, I used to be a node.js developer in the pre-1.0 days and switched to Rails, Elixir, Go, but I'll probably use node for my next project since it's super easy to get stuff running in messy JavaScript compared to something statically typed like Go. In most cases, performance is moot for projects without users. Hell, a CGI script written in Bash could rival the performance of modern web frameworks.