Phoenix looks really cool too but I’d have to learn Elixir and while that’s something I want to do (already started some years ago), my main prerequisite for this project was not to struggle and going comfy. Building something out of my hand with no roadblocks was more important to me than to learn something new.

It's a very simple language. I've worked on half a dozen projects where I helped an experienced dev new to Elixir ramp up to 80%-90% productivity within a few days.

Learning Phoenix (and a few other libraries like Ecto and now LiveView) is what would eat up your time.

Phoenix used to be very easy for Rails/Django/Laravel devs to pick up a few years ago, but now that LiveView is thoroughly built-in and Phoenix.View has been replaced by Phoenix.Component, it's much less familiar to those learners.