I'm sorry, but you seem to have misunderstood this discussion. I'm not saying mine is any better, we're simply discussing whether a stack is complex.

So what I use is irrelevant.

If you're so desperate to know what I've used, since 2004:

    - VB6
    - vb.net net webforms
    - old school vbscript + dynamic ajax
    - c# using xslt + ajax xml, without really using webforms
    - c# webforms
    - PHP wordpress
    - asp.net MVC
    - silverlight
    - rails
    - MVC + Web API with a jQuery/datatables/handlebars
    - MVC + Web API with a jQuery/jQuery-tmpl/jQuery-forms
    - Durandal with OData
    - knockout with a mix of MVC + WebAPI

Some playing with django and backbone and angular and laravel for my own projects too, but not particularly in anger.

To be frank, the worst one for unnecessary complexity, by a far, far, far, far way, was durandal. Pile of shit. React/angular definitely suffer from a similar over complexity.

Generally speaking, recently I haven't really chosen a stack, the last 4 projects I've worked on have all been past that phase when I joined.

When I have, it was 3 years ago and at the time I stuck with jQuery/datatables, at the time backbone was trendy and I hate any js framework which relies on methods for properties having been burnt by supporting a colleague's internally homebrewed jQuery-a-like with early template system that used that earlier in my career. Nightmare to debug.