Ask HN: Front-End Technology in 2014

Feel free to disregard this thread and move to the next. But for those starting new projects in 2014, this might be highly valuable.

This is a very dangerous question, I fully understand that this might very well explode into a thousand directions and would most definitely be shut down on Stackoverflow right away. But me searching the web only returns unweighted link lists that I do not nearly value as much as opinions on here.

In 2014, what's the status-quo on best-practices for front-end development, API-based, moderate traffic (10k to 200k daily visits) websites, with authenticated user dashboards?

I've been doing this since Perl/CGI times and have evolved through technology and done every and anything from html/html5/php/yii/js/perl/ruby/rails/python/django/angular/css/css3 and whatnot throughout the years. I feel most tools can get the job done either way, some are more comfortable, some are more reliable, some are more flexible, some are more resistant against high traffic.

If you would go about creating something like a small Google Analytics front-end, which fetches ALL it's data through a private API backend (JSON) and has user authentication to reach those dashboards/analytics --- what would be your weapons of choice, and why?

And please, don't pick by passion only (looking at you, Haskell, Scala, Go guys) - don't forget your business objectives - developer scarcity/availability, failure-recovery (and knowledge thereof), long-term experience with stability and maintenance resources on the web, etc.

Go!