Well, it will depends on the values we want to deliver to the customers. Today, Single Page Web Application is on rise because SPA eliminate page refreshing behaviours in the browser when the user navigates from one view to other views through performing actions on the page (e.g. click buttons, links, etc), which in turn delivers desktop-like experience to the user. A web SPA also opens opportunity to the team to re-use the codebase by building it into hybrid mobile android/iOS applications or even as cross platform desktop application that runs on Mac/Windows/Linux machines. This would help your team moving faster delivering your front end solutions to your customers which use variaous devices.
Personally, I'd like to follow on this trend due to its advantages and the stacks that we can use to deliver this experiences are Angular.js, Angular 2 or Reactjs. As for building the web SPA into desktop application, we could use Github Electron to achieve this. Ionic Framework v1 , v2 or React Native can be choosen for producing hybrid mobile application that runs on iOS & Android phones/tablets, from the webSPA's codebase.
As for the backend App (API) development, personally, i'd like to use backend development stacks that could free me from setting up & maintaining servers/ containers either on cloud or on premise. Today, we do see such this stack: The Serverless framework. This framework will allow us to deploy our Web SPA files into AWS S3 Bucket and host it in there without require us to setup express, apache, IIS servers (because AWS S3 Bucket can host static webpage & web SPA app now). Also, the framework could help us simplifying our efforts deploying our Node.js Backend logic by hosting our logics on AWS Lambda. During the deployment, it also prepare endpoint routes to each of the deployed AWS Lambda functions, by defining them on AWS API Gateway. Thus , it freed us from setting up our own EC2 in AWS or setup Nginx Reverse proxy as our API Gateway. Serverless & AWS Lambda + API Gateway get our jobs done on this part.