I started using it _way_ before it was even mentioned in AI projects. The key reasons I stuck with it were: 1. As a Pythonista, I _very_ much like its batteries included philosophy (I get proper Typescript, SQLite and a lot of goodies out of the box without hundreds of crufty NPM plugins) and 2. The tooling is awesome: a decent bundler, ability to build "single file" executables, etc.
If you think it's popular because of AI, think again.
I didn't say I thought it was popular because of AI. I clarified whether this mental link could be faulty because a lot of new projects are AI-related in general.
I might give it a shot soon. Would you recommend it for simpler all-in-one web projects that don't utilize most of the vast array of tools it includes? Or is it more suited to the heavy-weights?