I write react professionally, but for my freelance projects or any personal projects I came to a similar stack when it comes to simplicity.
Laravel
NGINX
VanillaJS/WebComponents (toying with Svelte right now)
MariaDB
Fast prototyping, simple deployment, almost no time spent with tooling.
A recent example with too much tooling I had was with Root's bedrock+trellis+sage. They do make working with WordPress management for a developer (a lot less clicking that with normal WP setup). But the frontend setup, webpack, backend, browserify and all of that is so complicated and slow. I was able to set it up on one machine, but failed to git clone the same project on two others. Scripts would be missing, things wouldn't load etc. Nightmare.
Laravel NGINX VanillaJS/WebComponents (toying with Svelte right now) MariaDB
Fast prototyping, simple deployment, almost no time spent with tooling.
A recent example with too much tooling I had was with Root's bedrock+trellis+sage. They do make working with WordPress management for a developer (a lot less clicking that with normal WP setup). But the frontend setup, webpack, backend, browserify and all of that is so complicated and slow. I was able to set it up on one machine, but failed to git clone the same project on two others. Scripts would be missing, things wouldn't load etc. Nightmare.