YMMV as they say, but in case you want anecdotal subjective recent experience... I had fun (most of the time) working with Angular 2 (now 4 to be accurate) in the frontend and fully serverless on the backend. (I can't compare to working with React and its ecosystem, but I plan to try it soon...)
For more classic apps, and this is just because of my past experience with it, I use Spring Boot with Thymeleaf. Once you get used to the idea of 100% serverside rendering (even for "ajax" stuff) it is one of the more productive frameworks I worked with. Much have changed, more convention over configuration, no need for XML config files. And I can use Scala / Kotlin and I assume also Groovy with it (although Java 8 is working for me most of the time)
For simple UIs, the 2nd option was way faster, surprisingly I didn't see any significant performance differences between the two approaches. The Spring way for me was much more straight forward, but again, I worked with Spring for ages...
For more classic apps, and this is just because of my past experience with it, I use Spring Boot with Thymeleaf. Once you get used to the idea of 100% serverside rendering (even for "ajax" stuff) it is one of the more productive frameworks I worked with. Much have changed, more convention over configuration, no need for XML config files. And I can use Scala / Kotlin and I assume also Groovy with it (although Java 8 is working for me most of the time)
For simple UIs, the 2nd option was way faster, surprisingly I didn't see any significant performance differences between the two approaches. The Spring way for me was much more straight forward, but again, I worked with Spring for ages...