Questions:
1: Which technologies are popular and what do people like about them? (To help someone deciding between). Seems like React frontend, or perhaps Vue? and Node being the popular backend?
2: Is there a site that keeps track of the various options for frontend and backend frameworks and how their popularity progresses?
If not, I would still go with Rails. Its massively productive, batteries included... and forces you to learn some practices that you can later take to other frameworks (migrations, asset pipeline, etc).
I dont know of any other framework that forces you to adopt these. On HN, you will find a lot of rhetoric against that - which may be true for experienced programmers.
But for sheer productivity from someone new to all this... Rails really cannot be beaten.
In the JS world, you will spend atleast a couple of days figuring out Requirejs vs AMD vs commonjs vs webpack vs browserify vs npm vs yarn.
I'm not so sure if it is worth it...unless learning JS frameworks was your goal all along.