I'm almost exactly the same situation these days: small project, got to choose my tech stack, so I went with a "conservative" part I have good experience with (

I'm almost exactly the same situation these days: small project, got to choose my tech stack, so I went with a "conservative" part I have good experience with (backend in Flask) and a more experimental part (for me) that I'm taking the occasion to explore and learn: React + TypeScript + Material UI. For that latter part, although I must recognize that the tooling has evolved into a quite complex pipeline (which is a cognitive investment, almost a gamble, in itself), I also clearly see the benefits of a set of ideas that have rapidly evolved in the turbocharged settings of the web development ecosystem: React: the distillation of many programming paradigms (functional, composition over inheritance, etc) for building UI components. TypeScript: the augmentation of JS with mature and powerful programming constructs. Material: a visual language for UIs with a strong focus on coherence and being truly cross-platform. All in all, although I'm well aware of the critiques that can be addressed to the modern webdev environment (the so-called "JS fatigue"), I feel like all these new tools empower me, and I really enjoy learning about them.