All of my pet projects are run on Elixir/Phoenix. If there is a language/framework to learn, this would be it. As approachable as Rails with the benefits of handling real time applications (chats are trivial with Channels) and faster runtimes than Rails (by orders of magnitude).
Happy to help anyone out if they're interested in learning!
The problem with nice backend systems is that it just makes the switch to frontend work even worse.
(Say what you will about Struts, but at least it makes JavaScript/React almost palatable by comparison.)
You can look into drab, an elixir server-side DOM manipulation library: https://github.com/grych/drab. I've never used it, but many people in the Elixir community think it holds a lot of potential.