Here's my approach - I think it will work for you, but you can use different tooling:

-Django server framework to handle templates, auth, routing, DB etc

- HTML templates and CSS (inline for one-offs, and CSS files for multi-use and defaults)

- Targeted JS without dependencies for UI manipulation and fetching data from the server as required.

I think you'll find the improvements in modern JS and CSS very nice. Flex, Grid, JS DOM apis etc. Ignore the bloated frontend frameworks etc.