What language am I looking for?

I'm glad I'm not the only one who feels a sense of doom doing web development in 2024. I have years of experience doing web development, but not continuously. I learned the atoms (HTML/CSS) years ago, and then got more familiar with the rest of the stack through a proprietary development interface, hosted locally. jQuery was the name of the game back then.

I finally did "real" full-stack web development only 2 years ago, and used a framework called Gatsby which was all the rage. After that contract ended, I dipped out into the embedded world for a little while.

When I returned to web dev a few months ago, Gatsby...no longer exists? Now there is this framework next.js that seems to be king of the hill. It's nice, but it doesn't feel light years ahead of anything else.

I've also gotten my hands on Django lately too, and it's also a pleasure to use, with some strange hiccups.

I find web dev frustrating to no end because of the amount of change. It hasn't sat still for long enough for me to understand it deeply, even though I've spent a large amount of my professional career involved with web development in some way. I finally learned how to configure DNS this year, only because I got serious about purchasing a domain and hosting an application. Only once I started working as the solo tech contributor on a startup idea did I realize how little of the stack I understood...