[spatx]

The short answer is - there is no good answer. The best thing that worked for me was to just pick a popular stack that can help me achieve specific some goal. And, possibly one with wide adoption and a thriving community and ecosystem, especially if you are looking for career prospects.

Spend a little bit of time with a couple of stacks to understand what you feel comfortable with.

When I was looking to transition from legacy technologies (think mainframes) while working at an established financial company, I had an itch to build a specific product on the side. To be able to build it, I had the option to choose any modern stack at that time (around 2012), and I chose the Java-Spring-Jquery. I could have chosen any other similar stack for my purpose (PHP, C#, etc on the backend and plain JS or any other library on the front end) that were widely used and had big ecosystems. I tried to build some basic functional products with both Java and PHP based stacks, and decided to go with the Java-Spring stack. These days there are even more options, so it boils down to trying a few and settling on one that excites you.