I think something I'd love is to see how to adopt some of the more decent frontend practices (e.g. having a component library) but rendering them using a backend that isn't something like NextJS. Can you import a component library and use it in a Flask app, say, or are the worlds just fundamentally too different?

For Go, something like gomponents [0] or Templ [1] would fit that. (Disclaimer: I wrote gomponents.) I even have a Datastar integration now. [2]

[0]: https://www.gomponents.com

[1]: https://templ.guide

[2]: https://www.maragu.dev/gomponents-datastar

Thanks - interesting! I was more thinking of a workflow where a designer makes a component in Figma, and it's probably polished and made available in a component library by a frontend/UI person, and it's probably a React component or a Web component. I was wondering whether that workflow was at all compatible with any of the non-JS backends that are reclaiming frontend a little.

And gomponents is great!

You can use datastar with ANY backend and templating system that you want - you just have to return html with the appropriate (and standards-compliant) attributes and, optionally, js expressions.

Use php, python, rust, or anything else that you want. They all have various approaches to html templating.