Yeah, makes sense.
I’m also in a phase where I get to start a lot of new low-stakes web projects, so I’ve made a point of adopting at least one new-to-me tool for each. I love typescript, and am generally happy with modern front-end tooling, but the node back-end ecosystem drives me bonkers — too many paper-cuts from too many tools along the lines you’ve documented here — and has me regularly retreating back to Python or Ruby land.