Thanks, Warrenm, for your comments and questions. In the past have used far too many languages to list. What I'm currently using is mostly .Net/C#, but as explained, I grow weary of the constant tweaking, the constant confusing releases and naming conventions, etc. Yes, I will stay in webdev, and location matters not, as I work for myself and have managed to service clients all over the world, often without ever even meeting face to face. My clients range in size from single employee startups to over a dozen multinational corporations.
By "fast/efficient" I was mainly speaking about speed of execution, although speed of development/maintenance is always important. Fast/efficient means (generally, and in my case) be able to handle thousands to tens of thousands of simultaneous users on a single web server. Which I currently can handily do with no problem.
By saying "scale well" I realize that I am addressing a different skill set and cracking open a completely separate set of topics, but in general I was targeting the frameworks with that phrase. If a framework already has features baked-in for horizontal scaling then that would be a plus.
In my experience, Windows servers are always more expensive and often require a bit more horsepower (CPU and RAM) to get similar performance. Not only that, but (again - in my experience) I must then add additional solutions that generally cost more in a Windows server environment (WAF, firewall, monitoring, etc.), and which can often be had "for free" or low cost with a Linux solution.
As for your comment about "basically any language/framework will check this box," I would respectfully disagree. Although I am far from feeble-minded, I am - as mentioned - older. And even though I feel that I am as sharp as ever, growing older brings a certain resistance to change. It's not that I CAN'T learn new things, it's that I DON'T WANT to spend a lot of time and frustration making the change. If you are saying that all languages and dev environments have a similar learning curve (which I doubt you were saying) then I would have to disagree based on real-world experience. Learning APL and Lisp were very different from learning Databus and COBOL and Pascal. Learning C++ is very different from learning Cold Fusion. Etc.
But your points are well taken. Perhaps my questions are simply too broad. I was just hoping to open a discussion about tools and frameworks that people have found to be fast-executing, relatively easy to pick up, and which might bring a certain amount of joy back to web programming and getting things done, rather than being mired in minutiae. As an example, I've just seen a recent post here on Sveltekit/Svelte, which I am now researching. As another example, I've frequently heard people attribute a certain amount of happiness or joy to using Ruby/Rails.
That sounds nice.
