New software frameworks can be exciting and easier to hire for but it's rare that they bring a pure technical advantage over their predecessors - many great apps run on Java and jQuery from 10+ years ago. As an engineer you can learn a lot by studying older, bare metal approaches to programming.
That said, web architecture has evolved massively over the past 10 years and there are significant advantages to the modern stack. Specifically, edge servers can dramatically reduce web latency compared with a traditional server model from years ago (e.g. EC2, on-prem) from 600ms+ to reliably under 250ms for dynamic page loads.
Edge computing is not just a frontend design choice - often misunderstood - it is now a fully enabled system of queues, auto-scale compute (Cloudflare workers) and cache storage (Cloudflare KV) that can push your deepest application logic and records within a 250ms round-trip of your users.
A modern dev team can blur the line between BE and FE development and use the Cloudflare stack to bring DB records right into the edge and use a SSR application to transform content into web pages on demand. This gets you close to the theoretically optimal latency for web users, much faster than having your FE wait for critical data from a BE origin server on page load.
Given that CDNs and edge servers are globally distributed there will be a delay in data propagation between 5 and 60 seconds. Any application data that can tolerate this staleness can be served to your users within 300ms - if you push it to the edge.
George