Current approach to development of web application [on hold]

Good day all,

Some background: Many years ago, I used to be a developer (Mostly .Net windows apps and a little web). I've not been in the business for a while and recently I developed the need for a little basic web development again! Mostly personal projects, just for fun or a few basic POC's. Nothing enterprise or really production systems.

My problem: I started research a few weeks ago and I've just been overwhelmed completely. From what I remember years ago, there used to be HTML, JS, CSS and ASP/ASP.Net. Now, I see posts on "it's all one ASP" referring to MVC, ASP Webpages, Single page applications and webforms. I'm seeing so many other "things" now like MVC, MVVM, Razor, Entity Framework, combinations of MVC and entity framework, jQuery, JSON, Ajax, NodeJS, AngularJS, KnockoutJS, Bootstrap, SignalR, Nuget packages etc. Wow! Where did all this come from? I've been doing a lot of research in spare time over the last few weeks so I known in principle more or less what each of these concepts are. But my problem remains, I don't know where to even start.

My Requirement: All I need is to know: what is the simplest and easiest approach/model to use for building basic web applications on top of simple SQL Server databases with functionality limited to pretty much CRUD operations only that look neat/clean (basic styling) and feels responsive (like an application rather than a web site)?

I've been researching and trying to learn for weeks and I'm wasting my time. I need to know where to invest/focus my time. Which of the technologies mentioned above (or others I don't even know about) are considered "current" / "modern" / "best practice", are expected to stay alive for the foreseeable future and will satisfy my development requirements mentioned above (basic CRUD on clean responsive web UI). The smallest, simplest combination of technologies will be best - my time and capacity to learn is not so great these days.

Based on the research done so far, I'm guessing it'll be some combination of HTML5, Bootstrap and some variation of ASP.Net. I'm not sure, I need your guidance please.

Then there's the question of tools. There are so many these days that seems to be used in overlapping style with all the technologies mentioned above. Visual Studio ofcourse, web matrix, brackets etc etc. Once I've defined the framework that I will use for my web development needs (as described in this post), which tools are best suited for that set of technologies and where do you learn them? W3Schools? Microsoft Academy? Linda.com? Here?

In conclusion: I apologize for the long post and I know it's not a very specific code question but I don't know where else to turn. I just need to know how to define a simple and easy web development framework for myself and how to get started.

Many thanks in advance.