You can make interactive web sites with a minimal amount of JS (et al).
For example the mentioned Go has a HTML templating package in the std library.
You could use something like htmx (the creator is a regular on here) which is a very small, very convenient library that gets you 80% of the way for your typical web application.
For the rest, you can always just stick with plain old DOM manipulation or write web components if you want something that's more re-usable and general. No build step or transpilation shenanigans required here.
Sure, but you don't have to do it the way most JS projects do it.
I've made a career writing Django apps. In most cases, the JS I write is limited to vanilla JS with no JS dependencies (the minification is done by a Python library which might depend on JS, but it's abstracted away enough that I don't have to know). There needs to be a serious amount of justification to even install Node/NPM as part of a project.
The vast majority of work is done on the backend, with JS only being used for UX. I used to pull in React+ReactDOM on some projects, but Web components are paving the way for that to no longer be necessary.
As I mentioned elsewhere, it's possible to pull all of pip into a Python project and have all the same problems, but the culture around Python isn't quite as myopic as the JS community, so I've generally been able to keep dependencies more sparse when working on Python teams.
