These days with Hotwire and HTMX, you can go very far with Django/Rails (and I suppose Elixir too). Not having to write an API for your webapp to consume is huge.
Until you actually have reason to scale (eg you are building WhatsApp), building to optimize the productivity of your iteration cycle usually gives the best payoff for pre-PMF projects.
> Not having to write an API for your webapp to consume is huge.
This is something that is so understated. I use Blazor to achieve similar semantics in many .NET codebases.
The speedup you get by pulling the client state into the server is incredible. The time savings is easily measured in thousands of hours at this point. It's almost like working with old school PHP again, but you get all the 2-way stuff as well.
Until you actually have reason to scale (eg you are building WhatsApp), building to optimize the productivity of your iteration cycle usually gives the best payoff for pre-PMF projects.