Hey, I was in a similar situation at that inflection point but veered into PHP application development and couldn’t quite get away from the front end. Let me tell you: CSS Flexbox and Grid are amazing. AlpineJS is “just the good parts” of jQuery. You can go back now. Check out 11ty.
Maybe the admin of this instance should reconfigure their server to force HTTPS in the year of our Lord 2024 before they ask for any meaningful input or collaboration.