I'd be lying if I said this wasn't the case for myself :) All the new stuff also drains me and I'm a lot more motivated to hack up stuff in PHP and jquery for t

I'd be lying if I said this wasn't the case for myself :) All the new stuff also drains me and I'm a lot more motivated to hack up stuff in PHP and jquery for these side projects. I think you shouldn't let "the modern way to do things" stop you from hacking up prototypes in whatever way you want. I'll say though, after having done a few side projects with modern SaaS/stack -- e.g. Netlify, Heroku, nodejs -- it does start to look like to me that it's a time trade-off. When I embrace the JAM stack with static site gen (with Svelte/Sapper) and an API layer (nodejs on Heroku), what I'm doing is trade the time to get started (more time/effort) with less maintenance and deploy effort later. But if you have the passion to hack up something right this moment and can't deal with that drag to kick off the project, and you don't know if it's a product that'll work out and get traction anyway, by all means hack it up in PHP and jquery.