Matachines

I'm getting bored and frustrated by FE jobs and want a "section of programming" change. There are areas I'm interested in like distributed systems but since FE and by extension JS are the only things I know well it's a) hard for me to know what to do and b) worrying that my lack of experience will make it impossible to get a job in other areas.

I have ~5 years as a FE dev. Has anyone successfully escaped it?

Assuming you can make the choice, how do you decide if you want a single-page application or a good ol' server rendered sprinkled with JavaScript one?

I've had an idea for a project I want to build for a while. It's pretty CRUD-y but the resource the users have is a "timer", so to speak. Basically, a runnable recipe that counts down with time and shows which ingredients to put in at which time.

Everything can be server-rendered except the actual timer, which is what makes the choice hard for me (I'm fairly inexperienced and only been forced to do SPAs at work).

Assuming I go server-renderd, what should I use for the JS such that the timers are just "components" that are easy to render but don't take over the page like a full SPA would?

Thanks.