Favorite boring tech of late is ASP.NET w/ Blazor server-side rendering. .NET Core runtime has great performance, really nice DX, EF Core is arguably up there with ActiveRecord for persistence frameworks, and everything seems to hold together quite well. I really appreciate that the designers of ASP.NET have zero qualms just copying things they like from other frameworks wholesale. You have the pervasive DI that Spring has, Rails-style convention over configuration, and Blazor components are very similar to JS components. Auth is a first-party module that is reasonable to integrate.
The farther away I get from the JS ecosystem, the more fun webdev becomes for me.
I have very similar experience to yours (though I have yet to checkout Blazor, see my other comment in this thread). I also read CSS in Depth book by Keith Grant recently based on someone's recommendation on HN. After struggling with CSS for over a decade, it all finally makes sense now. I can layout a page exactly how I have it in mind. Webdev can be so much fun and productive with server side rendering, beautiful CSS and some sprinkling of JS where required.
Yeah I'm also moving over from Node into dotnet. The DX has been very nice with VSCode and EF Core is really one of the best ORMs in the market. Also the performance is fantastic.
For APIs I'm using FastEndpoints [1] and loving it. I'll probably end up switching to Minimal APIs once they have validation etc.
[1] https://fast-endpoints.com/