The funny thing is that I hate changing tech at the backend, but still love many of the innovations at the frontend.

I know, it still seems crazy what's happening at the frontend ... but Vite brings substantial advantages compared to the old standard. Same thing with the next-gen frameworks like Svelte, SolidJS or Vue 3 (composition API) that are substantially better than the old ones (mainly regarding DX). Another welcoming example are the quite new E2E testing frameworks like Cypress or Playwright.