I guess it depends on what your concerns are:

• If you're worried about too many libraries to pick from, I'd just go with the most popular ones. React is a pretty solid choice.

• If you're worried about config being a pain, I'd recommend going with one of the starter tools like Create React App. Build tools are indeed a bit complex, but hopefully that's getting better over time.

• If you're scared by lack of type safety or worried about language quirks, I'd recommend TypeScript. (Flow is also quite good.)

In particular, TypeScript (and Flow) provides much more flexible static typing than I've used in any other mainstream language. You get the nice navigation, autocomplete, and static checking that you'd expect from a typed language, and I've found that I spend much less time needing to think about how to write my code in a way that appeases the type system.

Here's a tutorial that hits all of the points above: https://github.com/Microsoft/TypeScript-React-Starter

I don't know how anybody could see what's going on with React and not be interested, it (at least for me) took what was once a very painful process of manipulating the DOM and working with the front-end and made it into an enjoyable and streamlined process. React actually brings order to what once a very messy and insane process.

I've used Node in production, it works very well for rapid prototyping. I could get a Node app up communicating with a diverse set of public APIs in minutes. It's not like Java or C# where I'm having to fumble around with a hefty IDE, a bunch of very strict typing, an entire compilation process and massively bloated web libraries. Node is a very lightweight alternative to that.

I think it's kind of a shame that the JS ecosystem has such a steep learning curve, which I think is where a lot of the hate stems from but once you learn it can be quite a powerful stack.

I'd recommend taking a look at Vue (https://vuejs.org/v2/guide/). You can write nontrivial and well-structured apps with just a text editor and not deal with npm/node unless you choose to. I also find it to be both simpler and more flexible than React.