Honestly it's a bit of both. I have yet to learn Unity, which I plan to learn through my classes over the next year. Right now, I find it kinda overwhelming.
On my previous jams, I used Pixi.js, which is a 2d graphics rendering API, but it wasn't really suited to make a tile-based game. For this jam I decided to experiment with the HTML canvas, which had a lot of limitations and wasn't great to work with, but was sufficient to make a tile-based game.
For the moment, I prefer to make games without an engine since programming is definitely my favorite part of gamedev, and doing it that way allows for everything to be at the same place. I know C# and made multiple SFML or console games in the past, but I am not too familiar with making a downloadable build and I thought it would be simpler to have a html game you can imbed in the page