I recommend Ruby on Rails. I am biased with 17 years of professional experience, but it has batteries included, end to end everything you need to build, test and deploy a modern web application. In my opinion Ruby is the most pleasant language to read and write. But try to compare many stacks and see what you like best.
In my experience (self hosting mail since 2005) signing up for SNDS does factor in. Although last time I had trouble with delivery to MS, my hosting provider Linode's support also helped out by contacting MS back channels on my behalf. The biggest problem I (rarely) have is when whole IP blocks end up on a ban list that MS seems to really trust. That said, fuck it, I will keep fighting the fight and self host my mail like a stubborn old git :p
I've recently switched my entire self hosted infrastructure to NixOS, but only after a few years of evaluation, because it's quite a paradigm shift but well worth it imho.
Before that I used to stick to a solid base of Debian with some docker containers. There are still a few of those remaining that I have yet to migrate to my NixOS infra (namely mosquitto, gotify, nodered and portainer for managing them).
Sorry, not an answer to your question, but I am interested in what functional language is the go to as a grad student? Thanks!
Yeah, fuck those colonists with their colonial powers! 💪