Why I chose the stack I used
This project is generally for informative purposes so a simple SPA architecture like React with pages that loaded up almost instantly seemed like a good fit. React's state management also made it easy to handle fetches and control behaviours reacting to any state changes. The project is hosted with Hostgator as they had a hosting plan that covered emails which is the primary way to contact the company from the site. I went with PHP to handle the email backend logic as the hosting plan didn't cover Node.js for the backend.
I personally prefer to use Scss for styling when I have to decide mostly because it feels like vanilla CSS with a few super powers. Yes, yes I like vanilla CSS haha.
Problems I ran into.
Figuring out the simplest way to handle email requests was easily the biggest challenge I had because, initially, I hadn't realized that the Hostgator plan didn't cover Node.js code.
So after a few hours wondering what I did wrong to get Express and nodemailer mad at me, I found out I had to find a 'non-node' way to handle emails.
I didn't have much experience setting up emails at the time so I wasn't hundred percent aware of all the options out there.
I had to comb through articles to decide which was worth trying and was a good fit for my situation. I eventually decided it would be simpler to just use PHP.
React router's navigation in production was a minor issue I had to solve. I found an article on how to deal with this if your site is hosted on a platform like Hostgator here.
What I learned
This project helped me get used to hosting react projects on sites that aren't built to host SPAs right off the bat. I learned more about DNSs and got better working with custom emails.