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SurveyJS
Open-Source JSON Form Builder to Create Dynamic Forms Right in Your App. With SurveyJS form UI libraries, you can build and style forms in a fully-integrated drag & drop form builder, render them in your JS app, and store form submission data in any backend, inc. PHP, ASP.NET Core, and Node.js.
A good framework hides all of this, and gradually reveals how it works to the user/coder.
I think Next.js does this very well, although I'll admit that their "getting started for total beginners" documentation spends way too much time explaining the magic. If I were to throw someone into the deep end to make their own mistakes, as I assume we all did with PHP, I would tell them to git clone https://github.com/vercel/next-learn/tree/master/basics/lear..., and then experiment with "pages/index.js".
Hot reloading that you get out-of-the-box with most JS frameworks is a massive improvement over static HTML, or PHP.
I've noticed this gap too, and started a (very alpha, experimental, and lately neglected) side project[0] that attempts to fit into this niche: a web server oriented explicitly towards "mildly dynamic" use cases. In its current form deployment/updates are definitely not as easy as with shared PHP hosting (I have ideas for how to improve that eventually) and it probably won't scale well to lots of traffic or lots of dynamism (e.g. it spins off separate processes to handle scripting/computation, just like CGI does), but it's been fun to work on and I think helps me cope with the ennui I feel whenever I'm faced with the modern "best practice" of "let's make everything a SPA".
[0]: https://github.com/mkantor/operator