It's 2021. PHP is still by far the most popular backend language. It is composed of many useful functions, and its language tags serve as a templating system. It's used by 83% of websites.
Laravel is the most popular modern PHP framework. It helps with authentication, image resizing...
Valet is a minimal environment to run Laravel locally on a Mac.
Vapor is a promising serverless SAAS for $39/mo to deploy and run Laravel online.