I agree in other replies here that if time is of an essence, it can cost too much short-term.
But I can attest to that MVC style frameworks can be really efficient for prototyping.
It can be a good long-term investment in my opinion.
I use IHP, that basically is like Phoenix but for Haskell.
There are some upsides I really like with this type of architecture:
Writing HTML (and even a bit of vanilla js) for most views is often simpler and more efficient.
You can (safely) inject database values directly into HTML, so far less creating API endpoints and fetching from them.
You can use for example Vue for just the very interactive parts (islands architecture)
At some point, you will just learn to love that pure functional languages (like Elixir and Haskell) basically just consist of functions, even though it can be a mindbender at first.
Forms with server-side validation are much simpler to build with
I can promise you that your JS knowledge will not be wasted. It will help you a lot, because you will end up needing JS anyway, just less of it.
For your question 2: Some of us just need to explore stuff and feed our curiosity even though it costs time :) I spent lots of time not shipping, but I'm really happy now that I finally found a stack that clicked for me
I agree in other replies here that if time is of an essence, it can cost too much short-term.
But I can attest to that MVC style frameworks can be really efficient for prototyping.
It can be a good long-term investment in my opinion.
I use IHP, that basically is like Phoenix but for Haskell.
There are some upsides I really like with this type of architecture:
Writing HTML (and even a bit of vanilla js) for most views is often simpler and more efficient.
You can (safely) inject database values directly into HTML, so far less creating API endpoints and fetching from them.
You can use for example Vue for just the very interactive parts (islands architecture)
At some point, you will just learn to love that pure functional languages (like Elixir and Haskell) basically just consist of functions, even though it can be a mindbender at first.
Forms with server-side validation are much simpler to build with
I can promise you that your JS knowledge will not be wasted. It will help you a lot, because you will end up needing JS anyway, just less of it.
For your question 2: Some of us just need to explore stuff and feed our curiosity even though it costs time :) I spent lots of time not shipping, but I'm really happy now that I finally found a stack that clicked for me