[freedomben]

This has been exactly my experience as well. There were things I really liked about JavaScript and node, but in the end the lack of framework and the ridiculously fast rate of change that can bit rot a code base in six months, was enough to drive me back.

I found elixir and Phoenix to be exactly what I needed. I use it exclusively now, except for legacy apps. Phoenix is the full framework, comprehensive in what you need. Compared to rails, I like it a bit better. It fixed some of the things I didn't like about rails, such as the extreme levels of magic. Phoenix is a lot more explicit. Performance is incredible, and you get some amazing features like live view, and many others just from being on the beam VM. Definitely worth a look if you're feeling like this.

Dang I didn't mean to turn this into a sales pitch for Phoenix! NextJS has also been quite enjoyable for me. I use it for static sites, or really anything that doesn't require a database. The ability to SSG everything and just serve it with nginx is a killer feature in my opinion.