I'm a Django guy and I still feel that the ascent of Django and Rails was the high-point of productivity in web development.

I still advocate for "progressive enhancement" as a development philosophy but the javascript kids seem to have taken over the show and regard back-end code as there for nothing more than building an API.

For the vast majority of javascript use-cases Turbolinks/PJAX gives you most of the benefit of a client-side framework (which usually boils down to faster response times by avoiding full page loads with the advantage that you get to keep most of your logic in nice server-side languages with non-pathological ecosystems.

Also see http://intercoolerjs.org/ - which follows a similar philosophy.