Great to see some discussion about this ecosystem. I literally started playing around with NaviServer just 9 days ago. It's definitely worth a glance. There are a lot of great utilities built right in: database connection pooling, a key-value cache, and more [0]
Tangentially related, I've been making my way through Greenspun's Software Engineering for Internet Applications [1] and have especially found the metadata section to be enlightening [2]. I like to think of myself as a competent engineer, but this quote hit too close to home
If you're programming one Web page at a time, you can switch to the language du jour in search of higher productivity. But you won't achieve significant gains unless you quit writing code for one page at a time. Think about ways to write down a machine-readable description of the application and user experience, then let the computer generate the application automatically.
[0] https://naviserver.sourceforge.io/n/toc.html