Same here. I used to make websites around late nineties and early 00s (I was about 12-14 at the time, but was doing a surprisingly good job), but find myself a little bit lost now. So, while I'm certainly not a professional web developer now, here's what I found useful in my small hobby projects.
First of all, I'm not trying to best solution — I'm pretty satisfied if my solution is just good enough. So, instead of top-notch technical quality, I aim for easy to learn tech, because I don't have a lot of time. So, I ended up using Angular in a couple of places for the client-only web apps, and using server-rendered templates backed up by Django on others. Both are mature frameworks, and both have a lot of very valid criticisms addressed at them — by professional developers that create huge projects at scale. Which I'm not, so I don't really care. And in terms of working with HTML, I always end up using Twitter bootstrap, which offers a reasonable amount of template elements that don't look ugly.
I also tried to use different project management/automation tools like npm, grunt, bower and else — because in my main line of work I can't live without em. However, I ended up that I have to spend too much time learning them compared with how much of my time do they save. So, now, instead of proper package management, I just copy minified sources and write a couple of makefiles and bash scripts to automate stuff instead of using JS and Web-specific tools and their special formats.
All of this was really hard for me, because I always feel an itch when I do not automate something that should be automated, copy code or in general, don't dig enough to find the best practice possible. But in this particular case, because I only create sites for small hobby projects, I had to make myself give a little bit less fucks, and spend this time working on actual functionality instead.