I recommend you see how far you can get with ASP.NET. That’ll keep you in the realm of “making a website” and away from “learning the entire Node.js stack from

I recommend you see how far you can get with ASP.NET. That’ll keep you in the realm of “making a website” and away from “learning the entire Node.js stack from first principles.” You could add (non-compiled) Vue.js templates to it which is more akin to jQuery, or try Blazor (ASP.NET that runs both on the client and on the server.) Neither of these are particularly well recognized as the typical path, but they will do the job if your intent is to build a functional website.