yea use what you're gonna be most productive with. i2p+ has a good throttle/filter system that helps a lot, not a lot of problems because of that, but like if you try to host a wordpress site here with i2pd you're gonna have a bad time

sort of fun challenge for me to try doing stuff without js, depends what you wanna do though, but get pretty far using some combination of frames refresh and cookies. http://simp.i2p/chat is jank, no doubt, but, no js needed lmao. possibly relevant to your security outfit, the chat page http://simp.i2p/botcheck attempts to do a bot challenge with css. unless you're specifically worried about bot spam that's completely unnecessary, just giving some ideas for stuff that can be done without js

lots of neat css tricks out there, like http://simp.i2p/search the styled dropdown is a checkbox, and http://gatheryourparty.i2p has a star rating on the posts but the stars are radio buttons. snex has that one setup with a ruby backend

not so familiar with those ecosystems, but think it's a little slower getting started like this but once you've got some templates it gets faster ;)