I'm very familiar with all the tools that we are open sourcing and I think that they are awesome :)
For side projects though, I still love PHP and Apache. The developer experience is still unmatched today. You just winscp to your box, create a file vjeux.php and go to domain.com/vjeux.php and it just works. You don't need to add any dependencies, you don't need to maintain a server running, eating one of your port for every single side project (seriously, who thought it was a good idea...), don't need to use the command line, don't need to setup a transpilation/bundling pipeline, don't need to deal with CORS... You can send the url to someone and it's going to work and keeps working years in the future.
I'm really excited about what people over at Zeit are doing on that front. I feel like they come from the same background and they get how awesome it could be.