Comment by yawaramin

There is a recent resurgence of backend-driven website interactivity micro-frameworks like Phoenix LiveView, Rails Stimulus/Hotwire, and most recently (and most generic) htmx. These all advocate for writing minimal (sometime zero) custom JavaScript and driving interactivity through use of partial HTML fragments returned by the backend. They also allow for ultra-simple tooling setup like just throwing a <script> tag into the page instead of having to set up an npm project.

htmx btw is about 12 KB gzipped and enables a surprising amount of interactivity on pages.