I think it is a balance. My current view on this is: For the frontend, everything but plain HTML, CSS, JS is too much. For the backend, an opinionated framewo

I think it is a balance. My current view on this is: For the frontend, everything but plain HTML, CSS, JS is too much. For the backend, an opinionated framework like Django is too much. Even a less opinionated framework like Flask is too much. Using modules that Flask uses - like Jinja templates - is the right choice for me. This way, I don't have the overhead of a full framework, but also don't have to write basics like a template engine myself. And I have the benefit that other developers (and AI) easily understand my code, as it has many similarities to a Flask project. So instead of going for Flask when I need templates, all I do is import jinja2 env = jinja2.Environment( loader=jinja2.FileSystemLoader('templates'), autoescape=jinja2.select_autoescape(['html', 'xml']) ) def template_data(template, data): tmpl = env.from_string(template) return tmpl.render(data) And I have a function I can use to template my data.