I remember trying to play with a web framework (z something?) but it felt half baked and the documentation was fairly lacking, for example.

In terms of documentation, several free books on Pharo are available at https://books.pharo.org/ As it's development is fast paced, they tend to get a bit outdated fast. But at least the basic ones get updated often. Most recent versions are from 2022. I think the framework you are referring to is Zinc.

You might mean Zinc? Actually it is a thoroughly modern http client/server library. It is documented here: https://books.pharo.org/booklet-Zinc/.

I based my own web framework on it. It is very featureful and well-written.

You can check:

https://github.com/zeroflag/Teapot

https://github.com/demarey/pharo-rest-tutorial

The readmes should give you a nice idea