Rather than changing express's syntax, I would much rather have a better express boilerplate generator with an opinionated stack with good documentation/justification. I recently started learning express/node and wasted weeks googling for blog posts for each dependency to figure out how to configure them. I guess this is somewhat valuable for end-to-end understanding but not for productivity. There are a bunch depend…
Totally agree with you. I miss the opinionated nature of Rails when I work in the JS world.
For example, I left the Rails world hungering for tiny, composable solutions like Clojure's Ring and Node's Koa.
I ended up preferring to just see glue code in my git diffs. For me and the small teams I work on, there's a lot of productivity to be gained when you can just look at the code and understand what's going on.
You end up with bespoke glue code per application, but the glue is generally simple so I didn't reap much reward from using a framework that tries to hide it at all cost.