Yeah it's funny... Now 10 years+ in the web dev business. I occasionally got drawn by the hype, dug myself considerably deep into express based frameworks, sails.js, koa.js, nest.js... But in the end i had to conclude, my first go-to framework django always came out superior in terms of developer productivity. It even eventually covered the bases where i still thought node was superior like async/websocket communication. Imho Django and similar batteries-included frameworks are as state-of-the-art as they've ever been.
Especially if you couple it with HTMX / Alpine.js you get a really good stack that covers all the dynamic page updates people are getting used to, without adopting massive frameworks.
I just started with HTMX and so far I think it's really promising. Similar things happening with Rails and Hotwire.
It took a while for these frameworks to accept that JS and the frontend are also important aspects of the stacks, and hard to avoid if you want to build modern applications. But now that they're picking up, heavy JS frameworks start making less sense.
At my first job we were migrating from Coldfusion to Java. This Middle Aged Sri Lankan guy refused and only worked on ASP.NET. Much respect to him! He knew what he was comfortable with - and most likely looked at Java in disgust the same way Java folk would look at ASP.NET :P
